Top most difficult languages in the world. The most difficult languages in the world

According to various estimates, there are from 2000 to 6000 languages in the world.

How do you know which one is the most difficult? By what criteria is this determined?

Firstly, it is believed that it is very important which language is a person’s native language. And it will be easier for him to learn similar languages. For example, it will be easier for a Pole to learn Russian than, for example, Turkish.

They also look at the complexity of the language's grammar. This is a very important indicator for determining which language is the most difficult.

The most complex of the most common, according to linguists, are Chinese, Japanese and Korean. Interestingly, the human brain perceives Chinese and Arabic differently from other languages. Speakers of these languages use both hemispheres of the brain when writing and reading, while speakers of other languages use only one hemisphere in this case. Here we can conclude that learning these languages will help greatly develop the brain.

Which languages are considered the most difficult to learn?

In Arabic, for example, in addition to writing from right to left, the pronunciation is difficult, there is no logic in writing the plural, many letters have four different meanings.

The Chinese language is difficult, firstly because you need to remember a huge number of characters. To read more or less, you need to know at least 3000. And in total there are more than 50,000 of them in the language. Tonal pronunciation system. That is, if you pronounce it without the necessary intonation, you may get a completely different meaning. Plus, the hieroglyph does not give an understanding of how the word should be pronounced.

Japanese is a completely confusing language. Firstly, the writing in it differs from pronunciation, secondly, there are three writing systems, and thirdly, you need to learn a huge number of hieroglyphs.

Hungarian is considered a very difficult language. It has 35 cases, many vowels, many suffixes. And his pronunciation is quite difficult.

The Estonian language has 12 cases and many different exceptions to the rules.

The Polish language is also quite difficult. You need to watch your pronunciation, otherwise they may not understand you.

The Icelandic language has many archaic forms that you will have to memorize.

There are also many less common languages, which are also very difficult to learn, which need to be mentioned.

For example, Eskimo (63 forms of the present tense), Chippewa (the language of the North American Chippewa Indians, the language contains about 6000 verbal forms), Haida (the language of the Haida people living in the North-West of North America, there are 70 prefixes in the language), Tabasaran (one of languages of the inhabitants of Dagestan). These languages are included in the Guinness Book of Records for their complexity.

Other difficult languages include: Tuyuca (the language of the eastern Amazon), Navajo (speaking bilingually, there are no published articles on the grammar of this language), Basque (possibly the oldest language in Europe), Czech, Finnish, Laotian, Nepali , modern Hebrew, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Sinhalese, Thai, Tamil, Turkish, Vietnamese.

The easiest languages in the world

And the simplest are: Danish, Dutch, French, Haitian, Creole, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish. True, this is data from American researchers. And they most correctly show the ease of learning a particular language for English-speaking students.

By the way, an interesting thing is that English is not considered the easiest language in the world. It has quite a lot of exceptions, specific pronunciation, etc. There is an opinion that it became international by accident.

First, let's determine which languages are popular today.

Of course English, which is unanimously considered the language of international communication.

Then Spanish, because it is spoken not only in Spain, but also in most countries of South America, and it is also one of the official languages of the United States.

We must not forget about French, and not only because it is the official language of Canada, as well as English, as well as the main language of many African countries, but also because this beautiful and melodic language has many fans who study it just like that, “for the love of art."

German, despite the limited territory of application (officially - Germany and Austria), still does not give up its position and has a huge army of students or masters of it, apparently due to the fact that Germany has had a huge historical and cultural influence on other countries, and continues to flourish in economically and politically.

Let's not forget about our own Russian language, after all, it is spoken not only in the largest country in the world, but also in the former Soviet republics, as well as by emigrants who have left this very country and republics in all other developed countries. Let's include it in our list also in order to compare its complexity with other popular languages.

Now let's face it and admit that actually the first person on this list should be Chinese, which is statistically the most widespread language in the world, because it is spoken by 1.213 billion people, which, you agree, is a lot.

First, for the sake of fairness, we wanted to add the national language of India to our list - Hindi, which takes an honorable 3rd place in the list of the most common languages, after Chinese and English. But, unfortunately, it is of little interest to anyone outside of Hindustan. This situation arose due to the active role of the English language, which in the century before last became lingua franca- the language of international communication. That is, in India you can communicate freely in English, and you will always be understood.

Therefore, we include in our analysis Arabic, spoken in many countries in the Middle East, North Africa, South and Central America.

So, let's start analyzing the complexity English, Spanish, French, German, Russian, Chinese and Arabic. Let’s immediately make a reservation that we will analyze them from the position of a Russian-speaking person, and we will take into account data about the Russian language itself from the position of foreigners studying it.

1. The simplest of these is considered... English language! There are no genders, cases, or word agreements; its grammar is quite simple. The words in it are short, as a rule, the verb and noun are denoted by the same word, verbs acquire a suffix only in the third person. Native speakers are calm about the mistakes of foreigners, because many people learn English as a second language. It is in English that 80% of the world's information is now stored, the bulk of technical and scientific literature is also printed in it, in addition, English is considered the language of the Internet.
For those who are just starting to learn English, it is important to understand that it is a language of structures, a language with a fixed word order. You just need to remember that the structure of each sentence is the same: “subject + predicate + minor members”, and in that order. You should also remember that every sentence must have verb. Well articles of course - they are the ones that cause the greatest difficulties for Russian speakers. In general, you can learn English quite quickly for everyday communication, but to master it... it takes more than one year. As they say, English is easy to learn, but hard to master.

Read more about the English language.

2. In second place you can put Spanish. Its vocabulary is similar to English because they share the same roots - Latin. Its spelling is simple - as it is written, so it is heard. The word order here is not fixed as rigidly as in English; auxiliary verbs are not needed. In addition, this language is brighter, richer and more interesting in terms of word formation - for example, diminutive suffixes are actively used (which simply do not exist in English). The tenses are at the same level of difficulty as in English, but the past is a bit messed up. In general, for a Russian person Spanish is easily perceived by ear, much easier than English, this is due to similar phonetics. Read more about the Spanish language.

3. French is also not very complicated, many of its words are similar to English and Russian, which is due to history. French is widely used and it is quite easy to find opportunities to learn and speak it.
The hardest thing about French is pronunciation and reading. It is difficult to get used to the fact that several letters in a word may not be read at all, and those that are read may be pronounced differently from how they are written. In addition, the pronunciation features of abbreviated forms are related and studied in parallel with basic grammar.
What about grammar? Verbs are conjugated by persons (there are both you and you) in different tenses and moods. In the traditional grammar system, there are 3 present tenses, 3 future tenses, 6 past tenses, 2 types of imperative mood, 2 types of conditional mood and 4 types of subjunctive mood. French is also distinguished by the abundant use of negative and restrictive phrases and the frequent use of the infinitive as a subject.

Despite its apparent complexity, the French language has many fans, even fans, and learning it is actually not that difficult. You can read more about French.

4. If you love long words and capitalized nouns - your language German. German is easier for people with a technical mind, it is quite schematic and predictable, its sentences are similar to an electrical circuit, where each subsequent link is connected to the previous one. It also looks like a spreading tree with many branches - rules and exceptions to them. You definitely can’t call it a poor or boring language!
German is difficult in its grammar, it has 4 cases and three genders of nouns, which, of course, are in no way related to the real qualities of the objects they denote (all articles are declined). According to Mark Twain, “In German a girl has no gender, although a turnip, say, has one.”
The German language also has a rather complex syntax, and the words in it can be very long, because... are formed by combining different words and adding suffixes and prefixes to them.

Despite the fact that its sound is considered a rough language, many people hear its lyricism and see its ornamental beauty. Although, let’s be honest: teaching him is not an easy task. As I said Richard Porson, "Life is too short to learn German." But, of course, this is an exaggeration. Read more about the German language.

5. Russian- this is certainly a rather difficult language. Even the Russians themselves have to learn it all their lives, and at school only a few get an “excellent” rating in it. Russian has 6 cases, while German has only 4, in general its grammar is very confusing, with many exceptions, exceptions to exceptions; The word order is not fixed, there are no articles, and the meaning is often conveyed by intonation.
Punctuation in Russian is quite confusing, but logical, but contains many rules.
It is difficult for foreigners to perceive Russian by ear due to its excellent phonetics - a large number of hissing and whistling sounds and a rolling “r”. Most people in the world consider Russian to be even more difficult than Chinese. Many people give up learning “tourist set” immediately after they try to pronounce "Hello" - Hello. Combination "hello" And "vstv" in one word is unpronounceable for most people.
Russian is a very emotional language. Its lexical content is rich and flexible - indeed, in no other language will you find so many diminutive and abusive words! For example: girl - girly - girl - little girl - wench - lass - damsel, and all of these are derivatives of one root. Compare English: girl - littlegirl, and that's it!
Much in Russian is not subject to logical comprehension, since it conveys mood and emotion.
For example:
- Do you want some tea?
- No, probably not.

So think about it, foreigners, whether we want tea or not.

6. Arabic no one will call it easy, but let's figure out how difficult it is. The first thing a beginner encounters and what scares him is the Arabic script, the Arabic script. However, the fear of the Arabic script is false, since it has only 28 letters that are connected to each other in print and writing. However, many letters have four different spellings - depending on their position in the word. Another difficulty (although essentially just a lack of habit) is the direction of writing from right to left. But stress in Arabic words is placed very simply and logically without any exceptions.
So what's so complicated about it, you ask? Firstly, the pronunciation of Arabic sounds corresponding to a particular letter is quite difficult for both Slavs and Europeans. This mainly concerns the reading of vowels, since it is believed that they are not there, but there are "vocalization". Arabic has 28 consonants and only 3 vowels - a, and, y- each of them can be short or long. But vowels are not reflected in writing. In addition, there are sounds there that have no equivalent in Russian. At the same time, words are read the same way as they are written.
Arabic grammar is also not encouraging - the verb usually comes before the predicate and the object. A verb has three numbers, so nouns and verbs must be learned in singular, dual and plural. The present tense has 13 forms. The noun has three cases and two genders.
You also need to take into account the fact that Arabic is the language of a completely different culture (for Russian speakers). Studying any European language, we will come across a lot of words that are familiar to us. And when studying Arabic, we will no longer come across a single familiar word.

Another problem with the Arabic language is that it has many dialects. Classical Arabic - the language of the Koran - was originally a dialect of Mecca (territory of Saudi Arabia), and its adapted form, which is called "Modern Standard Arabic", is now used in literature, newspapers, television and radio, in the mosque, as well as in the communication of educated people Arabs from different countries. But the differences between local dialects are sometimes so huge that a representative of Morocco, for example, may not be understood by an Iraqi, and vice versa, although formally both speak Arabic.

7. There is an opinion that Chinese not that complicated at all. In fact, only its grammar is simple and even primitive - there are no endings, no suffixes, no prefixes.
What makes Chinese really difficult is the mass of synonyms and the terrible interchangeability of words, as well as the hieroglyphs themselves. Many hieroglyphs are often synonyms, and the synonyms themselves require learning more and more new hieroglyphs, and often completely different words are read identically.

At the same time, there are no special problems when reading hieroglyphs; they arise in oral speech, when the brain has to deal with a mass of associations and words that sound the same. Therefore, the Chinese themselves speak in short phrases, sometimes repeating everything they said. And for a native speaker of the Slavic group, even just saying one Chinese sentence with correct, understandable pronunciation is already a great achievement, for which you need to work and work.
As for the simplicity of Chinese grammar, it is more than offset not only by complex writing, but also by extremely complex pronunciation with 4 tones, extensive homonymy, homophony, and homography. Thus, Chinese is in last place on our list, and you can read more about it.

So, we looked at 7 popular languages today and ranked them by degree of difficulty. But which language will be easier or more difficult for you is a separate question that depends on many factors. If, for example, you already taught English at school, like most Russians, then you will find it easier to speak related languages - German, Spanish, French.

If you have strong motivation, for example, the intention to move to another country (read about emigration), then of course the language you are learning will be easier for you - your emotional mood, interest in the life of the country, the press, television, the desire to watch films and TV shows in the language will affect you.

There is a myth that the Russian language is one of the most difficult in the world. However, in order to write a short resume about yourself in English, you will need a couple of months of training, but if you repeat this trick with Polish or Hungarian, you will have to master them for almost a year. So what is the most difficult language in the world? Today we will remember the 10 most difficult of all.

We have compiled our list from 10 to 1, where 10th place is the easiest of the difficult ones, the place belongs to the most difficult language to learn.

We present you the list in descending order: Icelandic, Polish, Basque, Estonian, Navajo, Japanese, Hungarian, Tuyuca, Arabic, Chinese. Today we will talk about three of them.

The most difficult language in the world, 10th place

The simplest of the complex languages was Icelandic, which retained words from ancient times. At least in Europe no one uses them anymore.

It is impossible to thoroughly learn this language without communicating with its native speakers, since transcription is not capable of conveying the sounds that Icelanders use.

To make it completely clear to you what we just wrote about, just try to pronounce this word: Eyjafjallajökull. This is the name of one of them. Do you want to learn this language?

The most difficult language in the world, 5th place

There are three types: hieroglyphs, katakana and hiragana. And even in the very manner of writing, the Japanese distinguished themselves - they write from right to left, in a column. Local students are especially unlucky, because in order to receive a higher education diploma, you need to know 15,000 hieroglyphs.

The most difficult language in the world: 1st place

Chinese is rightfully in first place in terms of complexity, but this does not prevent it from being considered the most common on the planet.

This language contains 87,000 hieroglyphs, although you can communicate knowing only 800, and someone who knows 3,000 hieroglyphs can read newspapers.

The problem is that the Chinese language has more than 10 dialects, and writing can be either columnar or horizontal, in European style.

Today you learned about the most complex languages of the world, the list of which would be incomplete without some Slavic dialect. Unfortunately or fortunately, this turned out to be not Russian, but Polish. It turns out that his grammar has not so many rules as exceptions to them.

The most difficult people - Polish

Our advice to those who want to learn Polish thoroughly: start with simple spoken language, and only when you master it will you be able to understand the logic of the grammar. Let's say there are 7 cases in this language, and you can only understand how they are used in practice.

The alphabet consists of 32 letters, but many of them are pronounced in two or three ways, differently. This is especially interesting when Poles pronounce the letter “l” as “v”.

Therefore, we especially try to protect you from trying to understand Polish only from familiar words. In this country, our Russian words can have a completely different meaning.

If you don’t want to rack your brains over complex languages, study European ones. They say that the brains of polyglots are much better developed, that their thinking and abilities are more advanced, but the main thing is not while you are learning foreign words and pronunciation features.

Start with English, and then maybe you’ll get to Chinese.

October 25, 2013

World languages

There are about 5 - 6 thousand different languages on our planet; approximately 40 from this list are spoken by two-thirds of the population of the entire globe. The most popular of them are: English, Chinese, Spanish, etc.

Among all this diversity, there are languages that are spoken by billions of people, and there are also those that are known by a small number of people. Each language uses its own letters, rules for writing words and phrases, pronunciation rules, and much more. This is what distinguishes them all from each other. Some of them are very complex. Let's take a closer look at the language complexity rating.

Language for encryption

So, the well-known Icelandic language opens the top ten. It is characterized by its complex grammar and pronunciation. Some sounds have no analogues in other languages, even in English, so it will be very difficult for a beginner trying to learn it. In addition, Icelandic has many very old declensions and conjugations.

Polish is in ninth position. Despite the fact that not many countries speak it, the language has as many as 7 cases. It should also be noted that it does not lend itself well to any grammatical rules and words - there are a lot of exceptions in it. All of them have to be memorized, otherwise there is no other way. Pronunciation itself is also of great importance. Only true Poles can speak without an accent, while foreigners cannot fully learn the pronunciation of words. All this makes Polish difficult to learn.

In eighth place is the Basque language. It has 24 cases and is very, very old. Its distinctive feature is that the connection between words lies in the designation of case endings. Some well-known moods are also present here, for example, potential. In general, this indicates complex grammar and word formation.

The Estonian language is in seventh place. It also has a lot of cases - 12. In addition to all this, words can have several meanings at once. The Estonian language also has a large number of exceptions, which makes it difficult to remember.

Sixth place rightfully belongs to the Navajo language. During World War II, this language was used by radio operators to encrypt messages. A very interesting fact is that there have never been any official textbooks or aids for its study. Its grammar is also complex. For example, if we compare it with many Slavic languages, then in it persons differ not by suffix, but by prefix. There are many similar examples that can be given.

Top five

The top five is opened by Japanese. It is very interesting because children have to master writing and pronunciation separately, since the pronunciation and spelling of words are different. In addition to all this, you need to learn 10 - 15 thousand hieroglyphs, a bunch of borrowed words and all the grammar. There are practically no rules in it.

The fourth position is occupied by Hungarian. It has 35 cases, which already says a lot. The alphabet has many vowels, which makes it difficult to learn.

Another little-known language was in the top three - Tuyuka. It has many classes of nouns, and one word can mean an entire phrase. This is the language of the Amazon. Another peculiarity is that here it is necessary to use special verb endings, which make it clear where the speaker learned about this fact.

Arabic and Chinese

Arabic takes second place.

Here, many letters can be written in different ways, in four different versions. There are more numbers here; another dual number is added. The present tense has 13 forms. Pronunciation is also important here. Therefore, in some countries, speaking the same Arabic may look different.

The first place undoubtedly goes to the Chinese language. There are no other languages like them in terms of complexity. It contains many very ancient and complex hieroglyphs that cannot be read, but you can only remember their meanings. There are also 4 tones here. All this makes the Chinese language unique. Despite its features, there are many people in the world who are trying to comprehend it, but not everyone succeeds.

As for the Russian language, it is not among the ten most difficult languages, but stands slightly behind. But nevertheless, thanks to its complex grammar, Russian is not an easy language.

Based on all of the above, we can conclude that Chinese has been the most difficult language for many years. It is followed by Arabic, which is spoken by many Muslims.

Language is a complex system of signs, which includes sounds and words, and for each nation it is unique and inimitable. Any language has its own characteristics, so to learn one of them, you need to try very hard - there are no simple and easy languages. We present to you the most difficult languages to learn, but which you can still master.

10. Icelandic

Icelandic is the most difficult to pronounce. It is considered the most ancient, and many linguistic units are used only by the native inhabitants of Iceland. No one except native speakers can convey the truly unique sound of words: phonetics contains sounds that, as they say, can break your tongue when pronounced.

9. Finnish

How about 15 cases and several hundred finite forms of the verb? But hot Finnish guys learn this at school. The only thing that makes a language simpler is the exact correspondence of the spelling of a word to its phonetics, that is, both we write and pronounce. Interestingly, Finnish does not have a future tense, but there are several forms of the past tense.

8. Navajo

Navajo is an Indian tribe. During World War II, this language was specially taught to American soldiers, who used it to transmit codes. In Navajo, verb forms are formed and modified by persons through the addition of prefixes, and in addition to vowels and consonants, there are special 4 tones: rising and falling, high and low. Navajo is gradually forgotten by young Indians: there are no dictionaries, and young people are gradually switching to English.

7. Hungarian

If you can crack 15 cases of Finnish like nuts, then try to master 35 cases of Hungarian and very long and drawn-out vowels. If this does not seem enough, then here is a countless number of suffixes and the same number of stable expressions unique to Hungarian. To somehow facilitate the study, there are only 2 forms of time for you: past and future.

6. Eskimo

The present tense of the verb alone in the Eskimo language has 63 forms, and each noun has more than 200 case forms, which are formed by changing the ending of the word, prefix and suffix. The Eskimo language, listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the most difficult sign system, is very figurative: for example, we simply say “Internet,” but an Eskimo will say “travel through layers.”

This is one of the official Dagestan languages, which is also noted in the Book of Records. It has 46 cases and not a single preposition. Postpositions are used instead. The Tabasaran language has 3 dialects. In general, the language includes many borrowings from Persian, Arabic, Azerbaijani and Russian.

Basque is spoken by a few residents of the south of France and the north of Spain. In dictionaries you can count approximately half a million words and dialects. The Basque language was also used by cunning American intelligence officers who participated in World War II, transmitting secret information to headquarters.

3. Russian

Yes, yes, our native language is in third place in terms of difficulty to learn. The main difficulty for foreigners in studying our “great and mighty” is the emphasis. For example, in French the stress always falls on the last syllable, but in ours the stress can be placed absolutely anywhere in the word. Sometimes the meaning of the word itself depends on which syllable is stressed, for example, Organ and organ. The Russian language is very rich in synonyms: one lexical unit can have several dozen synonyms. By the way, a huge variety of fonts have been developed for our language, and you can see the 25 best of them.

2. Arabic

One letter in Arabic can have 4 spellings, depending on its location in the word. There are no lowercase letters in this language, and the rules prohibit breaking words with hyphenation. The most important thing is that vowel sounds are not displayed when writing, and words are written from right to left. Almost all languages of the world have two numbers: singular and plural, but in Arabic there is a third number - dual. Here, each word has its own special pronunciation, and there are none that are pronounced the same. This is due to the fact that each individual sound has 4 tones, and its pronunciation is affected by the place it occupies in the word.

1. Chinese

We all know that in writing the Chinese use hieroglyphs, of which there are more than 87 thousand, and how they are written is incredibly important: the meaning of the word will depend on the degree of pressure and the length of any stroke. Moreover, one “letter” of a hieroglyph can denote a separate word, or even a whole sentence, and the graphic symbol does not carry a phonetic load.