The 10 Most Difficult Languages to Learn

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) categorizes languages according to the difficulty of mastery. Here's a list of the ten most complex languages, whose obscure grammatical rules are enough to give learners a headache.

10th: French

For those who speak Latin languages such as Spanish, Italian, etc., French is relatively easy to learn. But strict grammar and pronunciation rules (silent letters, joint recitation...) are serious pitfalls for those beginners.

9th...and 8th and 7th: Germanic Languages

Danish, Norwegian, and especially German, due to their large number of consonants and the length of some compound words, can be tough at first contact, but that's not all. They also have inflections, which require changing word forms based on grammatical relationships within the same sentence. And don't forget about inflections of gender, number, case, and complex verb conjugations.

6th: Finnish

Finnish is an inflected language and an agglutinative language (words have many prefixes and suffixes).

Finnish even changes verbs, nouns, pronouns, adjectives and numerals (!) depending on the role of the vocabulary in the sentence... not to mention the vowel harmony that keeps students awake: in the same word , some vowels must be harmonious and cannot be juxtaposed.

5th: Japanese

As the first Asian language in this category, Japanese has its own alphabet (or rather two sets of alphabets, and two kanji comparison tables for pronunciation), and it has a huge gap between written and spoken languages difference.

Japanese grammar is relatively simple, but the expressions used for various polite expressions and language etiquette are very cumbersome. Japanese honorifics are a cultural form that can easily lead to "mistakes".

4th: Icelandic

Icelandic still uses the "classical" of the North Germanic languages, and there are some (serious) archaic languages formed over a long period of geographic isolation.

Its vocabulary is particularly specific, grammatically, some vowels are affected by the surrounding in inflections of gender, number, case and verb conjugation... When knowing that a word can have 70 different forms, we You can imagine how frustrating this is.

3rd: Arabic

Besides its unique alphabet, writing from right to left, and the scarcity of vowels, Arabic has other difficulties. The complex word construction based on the root makes learning the language difficult, and pronunciation requires a lot of patience and perseverance, with guttural sounds being the trickiest for English or French-speaking learners.

2nd: Greek

Although Greek has evolved with the times, it is still a very complex language with many remnants of ancient languages.

Aside from the hurdles of the alphabet, its stress rules are notoriously complex. Yet stress plays a central role in the language: the meaning of a word can change completely depending on intonation, or stress.

The most difficult language in the world: Chinese

The crown of the most difficult language belongs to Chinese.

Come to understand the complexity of this language: there is no directivity between written form (text) and pronunciation... pronunciation method and tone can completely change the meaning of a word.

The tones are of course unique to Chinese, and are barely perceptible to the Latin ear...so mastering the language requires constant practice.

So what is the simplest language (la langue la plus facile)?

The answer is - English.

As a "lite" version of Germanic, English has become easier over time. Also, we all have a basic English vocabulary which makes learning easier.

Do you agree with this list?