10 most difficult languages to learn in the world

Learning a different language can be fun and open new possibilities. However, some languages are easier to learn than others.

What groups all of these languages together is their relative lack of connection to the English language. Learning any of these languages puts you into an exclusive community, and few things are quite as rewarding as being able to translate between two vastly different languages and cultures. Being able to translate these of languages certainly puts you in a perfect position to become a translator in a less competitive (and more sought-after, higher-paid) language pair.

 Just what are the most difficult languages to learn? While a lot of it depends on your native language and many other factors, we’ve compiled a list of some of the most challenging languages for many learners. Here are the 10 Most Difficult Languages To Learn In The World

10.  Croatian

Croatian is the standardized variety of the Serbo-Croatian language and is one of the official languages of the European Union. It is based on the dialect of Eastern Herzegovinian, which is also the basis of many other languages, including Montenegrin, Standard Serbian, and Bosnian.

9.  Icelandic

This North Germanic language is an Indo-European language. It was largely influenced by Danish and Swedish languages after the colonization of the Americas.

Icelandic is extremely complicated, and while not a language isolate, the fact that it is spoken by less than 400,000 people on one island has certainly left it with its own oddities. The language is largely unchanged since Iceland was settled in the ninth and tenth centuries, and rather than adopting foreign words for new concepts, Icelandic instead opts to coin new words of give new meaning to old words. All of this makes learning it a challenge, as becoming anywhere close to fluent you need to be in Iceland and make use of the resources there versus learning remotely. 

8. Gaelic

 Also known as Scottish Gaelic, this language is a Celtic language that is spoken by the natives of Scotland. It’s a member of the Goidelic branch and was developed out of the Middle Irish Language, just like Manx and Modern Irish.

7. Basque

Like Korean, Basque is a language isolate. While it has borrowed vocabulary from the romance languages, the way it’s written and spoken is distinct from any other language. This even extends to differences between the several versions of Basque that still exist. Despite being spoken by less than 700,000 people, there are at least five distinct Basque dialects, so not only is it tough to learn, but you need to pay attention to which version you’d like to learn as well.

6. Vietnamese

Vietnamese is the national and official language of Vietnam, as well as a first or second language for many of its ethnic minorities. Vietnamese vocabulary has borrowings from Chinese; however the Vietnamese alphabet in use today is a Latin alphabet with additional diacritics for tones and certain letters.

5. Hungarian

Making the list with 26 cases, Hungarian has some of the most difficult grammar rules you’ll come across. In Hungarian, suffixes dictate tense and possession instead of the word order, which is how most European languages tackle the problem. Moreover, subtle cultural elements within Hungarian make it uniquely difficult to learn.

4. Thai

More popularly known as Siamese or Central Thai, the Thai language is the official national language of Thailand. It’s a member of the Tai-Kadai language family. Almost half of its words are borrowed from Pali, Old Khmer, or Sanskrit. Thai is basically tonal and analytic and is known for its complex written alphabet and markers.

3. Korean 

As the most spoken language isolate — a language with no demonstrable genealogical relationship to other languages —  Korean is an especially unique language. For instance, when describing an action in Korean, the subject goes first, then the object, and finally the sentence ends with the action. Practically this means saying “나는 물을 마실” is directly translated as “I water drink” as opposed to the English “I drink water.”

2. Arabic

In Arabic, most letters are written in 4 different forms depending on where they’re placed in a word, and to complicate things, vowels are not included when writing. This makes translation a much more difficult task in Arabic than most other languages. On top of this, Arabic has many different dialects, meaning that the Arabic spoken in Egypt is different from that spoken in Saudi Arabia.

1. Chinese

The Chinese language takes many forms that are not mutually intelligible. This language is spoken by about a fifth of the total world population and is considered among the most difficult languages to learn. The Standard Chinese language is spoken in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the Republic of China (Taiwan), and Singapore.