What is the most difficult and daunting problem for you when. Conducting a controlled study of relative language difficulty is very difficult considering the large number of variables that affect language acquisition. From an english speakers perspective, its difficult because there are many sounds and trains of thought that the english mind doesnt like. European language map reveals the hardest language to learn. They clash with our speech patterns in a remarkable way. We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. I kept hearing about how difficult russian is to learn up until that point but my experience there said something very different. Really learn the most useful telephoning phrases download. The 10 most important hungarian verbs and how to use them. On the other hand, german and russian languages use a punctuation system said to be among the most difficult ones in the world. Depending on your personality, you may choose to go with the more. In category iii there are the indonesian, malaysian and swahili languages, with 36 weeks 900 hours of learning time.
Is czech a difficult language for native english speakers. We mapped how long it takes to learn almost 70 different languages. Languages of the world photo via shutterstock looking to learn a new language. Hungarian is from another language family and consecutively works differently.
Hardest languages to learn top ten list thetoptens. Mandarin is a language within the chinese language group and is actually the most spoken language in the world. Since mandarin is a tonal language, you can have a completely different meaning of a word just by changing your tone. There is no absolute answer to which language is the easiest or most difficult. This can help make it seem difficult for foreigners to learn.
Why hungarian is easy fluent in 3 months language hacking. This is daunting for an english speaker to learn, as there are almost no cognate or similar words like it in english. These volumes comprise an, introduction to the hungarian language. Hungarian is not structured in that manner but by pragmatics. Most hungarianlearners will very quickly learn that van means to be or something like that, megy means to go and csinal means to do. Research question this paper attempts to discover why some students are unsuccessful in fl classes and. Weve compiled a list of the 11 easiest languages to learn based on. Language difficulty ranking effective language learning. Hungarian is one of those languages that uses cases as in latin in names. Title page foreign language learning difficulties and. However, its also the hardest language we have based on the easiest languages because youll find few opportunities to practice the. Foreign language learning national security agency.
Hungarian is one of the most logical and straightforward languages in the world. Difficulty of learning languagesarchive 1 wikipedia. How to learn hungarian the ultimate guide catch budapest. Language learning difficulty about world languages. As the most spoken language isolate a language with no demonstrable genealogical relationship to other languages korean is an especially unique language. It is the language which is difficult to be spoken and understood by other people of the world. From the above list, you can come to know about the origin of the most difficult languages to learn in the world. After this particular study time you will reach speaking 3. If youre looking for official statistics, the defense language institute where they teach members of the cia foreign languages. The map below shows how long it takes to learn almost 70 different languages, estimated by the foreign service institute, which teaches these languages to wouldbe or current. Without further ado, these are our top ten hardest but most rewarding languages to learn. Learners across the globe seem to have extreme feelings towards englishits the hardest or the easiest language theyve ever learned, they love it or they hate it. A lot of native english speakers who begin to learn languages struggle with the.
When it comes to learning difficulty, not all languages are created equal. Foreign service institute language difficulty rankings are an indication of how long a native english speaker would need to reach proficiency in a number of different languages. Fsi hungarian basic course volume 1 student text live lingua. The office of website management, bureau of public affairs, manages this site as a portal for information from the u. English speakers will struggle learning these languages. Nov 29, 2017 countries on the map are colored according to how much time it takes to learn the local language. Whatever language can boost your career, or bring you the most pleasure and fun can be considered the best and most important. There five are categories ranked from easiest to the hardest based on how many classroom hours a learner would need to complete. External links to other internet sites should not be construed as an endorsement of the views or privacy policies contained therein.
All that aside, the british foreign office conducted a language study recently and concluded that the most difficult language to learn is basque, spoken in parts of spain and france, followed closely by hungarian, which has 35 cases or noun forms. These are the 6 hardest languages for english speakers to learn. Along with having a completely foreign alphabet, both in script and direction of reading, individuals find difficulty with new speech patterns and sounds not found in english. If you search for the most difficult languages to learn, hungarian comes up in top 10, along with arabic, japanese, navajo and mandarin. Check out the fsis full list of languages on the next page. Weve said it a few times now, yes, these 10 languages are some of the hardest languages to learn. Start with the ones you think youll use most often and build from there. Barry farber, the author of how to learn any language and a polyglot many times over, says that finnish is one of the hardest languages for him to learn. Abkhazabazin abkhaz is an extremely difficult language to learn. What did you think what the hardest language in the world before. Most difficult language to learn bright blue weather. The farther your mothertongue is from a language you want to learn, the harder it will get, because you will not have any familiar patterns to lean on.
For english speakers, it is especially difficult to learn languages like japanese, arabic, and hungarian. If you pick the right learning method and are motivated enough, theres no reason you cant learn one, or all of them. According to the foreign service institute, japanese is the most difficult language for a native english speaker to learn. For an english speaker, however, mastering mandarin is a tall order. Though, there are plenty of several languages spoken by people present all over the globe.
It may be from a different language family, but being located in europe means it took on many loan words from its neighbours and if you familiarise yourself with this list youll have a nice wee head start. Is hungarian one of the most difficult languages to learn. Hungarian is the most creative language in the world. Hungarian is a finnougric language, while english is indoeuropean.
While reinforcing material from the book, the cds also contain a variety of additional exercises, including roleplaying, and a useful guide to pronunciation. This does not mean that hungarian is the hardest language to learn for everybody, but it causes british diplomatic staff, who are used to learning languages, the most difficulty. No qualitative or quantitative analysis of language learning difficulty has been. To sum up, it is about multiple factors language learners are not used to. Jun 16, 2019 this is the best video to get started with hungarian language click here to learn hungarian twice as fast with free pdf. While mandarin, arabic, and korean are sufficiently difficult to comprehend, japanese has a reputation for being the toughest in. Arabic is one of the hardest languages for native english speakers and is a language i have been learning for four years now. It is certainly easier for a dutch child to learn english than a japanese. The 11 easiest languages to learn depending on your native. We offer many tips on how to best learn a language that will surely help you to tackle even the most difficult language on this list. Learn hungarian learn languages grammar and vocabulary.
Jan 03, 2020 hungarian isnt like most other languages. Map shows which languages are hardest to learn for native. Learning hungarian with a private teacher the fun way. Foreign service institute language difficulty rankings. Why and how to learn hungarian vocabulary with audio. Jul, 2011 these two 60miniute cds, recorded by native speakers of hungarian, are an invaluable component of the colloquial hungarian course. This is a big bias in any question about the inherent difficulty of learning a language. A year or so ago i moved to a small town in russia and lived immersed in the language having learned almost nothing before arriving. Arabic, cantonese, japanese are said to be the hardest, based on the approximate learning expectations compiled by the foreign service institute fsi of the us department of state. The best way is to get a chart of them and learn one by one. Normally, our sentences are constructed like thissubjectverbobject. Perhaps youre torn between a semester in spain versus a semester in turkey and you discovered, thanks to this infographic, that spanish is easier to learn than turkish. The darkercolored the country, the longer it takes. In fact, how hard it is to learn depends on what your native language is.
This blog post is available as a convenient and portable pdf that you can take. May 19, 2014 it is quite subjective to say which is the most difficult language s to learn in the world. How i learn languages may be its rich, wideranging meditations. Finnish, hungarian, and estonian are also among the hardest because of the countless noun cases.
Some tips to help you with a few of the most difficult languages to learn. Why are these the top 10 hardest languages in the world. Keeping in mind that the spelling changes to be true to hungarian phonetics, youll certainly recognise these. Many people ask the question what is the most important language to learn.
But i do agree that chinese language s are the most difficult to learn languages and master in the world. Translation and response drills, as noted above, are in most. The language that is most difficult for a person to learn depends on their native tongue and on how closely their native language is related to the one they are trying to learn for instance. Yes, i do think that czech is a very complicated language. The closest languages to it are rare dialects that survive in small pockets in northern siberia. Hungarian is one of the hardest languages in the world. The 20 most difficult languages in the world to learn. The languages that take the most time to learn, for. Most of these languages, however, belong to the finnic branch of this group, while hungarian belongs to the ugric. It is considered extremely difficult for foreigners to learn, with its vocabulary largely from asia and its grammar containing a number of complex features not to be found in other western languages.
The hardest languages for english speakers to learn. There are really two things that make one language more difficult than another. You cant reasonably hope to bump into hungarian speakers often enough to. Many people answer that chinese is the hardest language to learn, possibly influenced by the thought of learning the chinese writing system, and the pronunciation of chinese does appear to be very difficult for many foreign learners. This does not mean that hungarian is the hardest language to learn for everybody, but it causes british diplomatic staff, who are used to. So you can state that hungarian differs in its grammar from most languages. Since hungarian doesnt share a lot of vocabulary or grammar with any of the worlds most commonly spoken languages, it can be both challenging and rewarding to learn. This is also the reason why learning hungarian can enrich you in more ways than simply speaking a new language. May 08, 2019 im sure that most of you already know the meaning of these words in theory. However, tabassaran, a caucasian language has 48 cases, so it would probably cause more difficulty if british diplomats had to learn it. The text is further distinguished by the fact that it is the document of a learner who acquired most of her languages as an adult. The fsi hungarian basic course has been written with the aim of providing the student with a firm control of the basic structure of the spoken language and a vocabulary adequate for him to make limited practical use of both the spoken and written. The easiest and the most difficult languages antimoon forum. Japanese japanese is considered one of the toughest languages to learn.
A2a this map is from the point of view of americans first language l1 english hoping to learn foreign languages european l2s. Thats because they contain very different grammar systems, sounds, and features than english. When learning to study a language i like to use it to get a rough base of the grammar rules. The main challenge that lies in learning is new language is adapting to the syntax as well as learning about the culture behind it, which surprisingly contributes a lot to how the language is yielded. Without germanic or latin influence, finnish vocabulary is completely alien to english speakers. An analysis of the difficulty of learning various foreign languages. Heres a list of the top ten most difficult languages to learn. However, in hungarian it is not enough to simply learn these words and to associate one single. They have free pdf files of grammar textbooks and novels in almost any language. Most difficult language to learn archive 1 this is an archive of past discussions. It will take you about 44 weeks and around 1,100 hours of instruction, as its considered a language with significant linguistic andor cultural differences from english. Aug 31, 2016 the differences in understanding what makes arabic, well, arabic is also the reason why its difficult to determine its number of speakers. For instance, when describing an action in korean, the subject goes first, then the.
Unlike turkish or hungarian, consonant gradation forms a major part of finnish morphology. If you are a logical thinking linguist for example, if you excelled in understanding latin grammar at school then youll have a good advantage. However, tabassaran, a caucasian language has 48 cases, so it might cause more difficulty if british diplomats had to learn. How hard it is to learn a particular foreign language for you depends on many different factors, such as natural talent, available learning resources, and your learning plan, but i believe that the single most important factor is how closely related the language is to the languages you already speak. Apr 21, 2015 possibly the most commonly asked question about language learning is what is the easiest language to learn. Learning them is a chore and probably one of the hardest parts of getting to grips with hungarian. Certain languages are definitely harder to learn during the beginners stage than others. The foreign service institute fsi has created a list to show the approximate time you need to learn a specific language as an english speaker. Only the german language was put in category ii, with its 30 week and 750 hours of learning time. So hungarian is frequently said to be one of the hardest languages for a english speaker to learn. Our final list of easy languages to learn is completed with, danish.
Mar 06, 2015 moreover, subtle cultural elements within hungarian make it uniquely difficult to learn. Yet, because language difficulty is in large part a subjective notion, there is no objective language ranking that can apply to any speaker of any language. Finnish is in the finnougric language family, with estonian and hungarian. The question of the title is yet more difficult to answer because whether a language is considered easy or not depends to a large extent on the learners mother tongue. But if youre looking for a tougher linguistic challenge, try learning hungarian. The 11 easiest languages to learn depending on your native language and learning style.
It is an agglutinative language, meaning that it heavily relies on prefixes and suffixes. Finnish has a reputation for being a tricky language to learn, and with good reason. You can see that in this pdf click to view directly on the site or right. These languages are most common in asia and the middle east. Add to that thousands of characters, complex systems, and the language s richness in homophones, 1 and youve got one of the hardest languages to learn in the world. Hardest languages to learn in the world list of top ten. This does not mean that hungarian is the hardest language to learn for everyone, but it causes british diplomatic personnel, who are generally used to learning languages, the most difficulty. Even among slavic languages from which i am acquainted, to some degree, with czech, slovak, polish, and russian, czech is probably one of the hardest, but most slavic languages are, in principle, similar.
Pdf an analysis of the difficulty of learning various foreign. We are often asked what is the most difficult language to learn, and it is a difficult question to answer because there are a lot of things to take into consideration. May 27, 2014 languages of the world photo via shutterstock looking to learn a new language. In that regard, any languages can be considered important to learn depending on your purpose for learning it. The 9 hardest languages for englishspeakers to learn.
The second hardest is japanese, which probably comes as no surprise to many, but the language that they have found to be the most difficult to learn is hungarian, which has 35 cases forms of a nouns according to whether it is subject, object, genitive, etc. Languages in category v are the most challenging for english speakers because they generally have completely unfamiliar scripts and cultural assumptions. For chinese speakers like us, we would find learning japanese, korean much easier. German is also quite logical and russian is not more difficult than croatian, perhaps it is much more complex than russian grammatically, so the above charts dont make sense. Learning hungarian properly involves dealing with six verb tenses in english we only have two, which we combine with other words to create stuff like the future imperfect or whatever. If you search for the most difficult languages to learn, hungarian comes up in top 10, along with arabic. I am often asked why english is such a difficult to learn for nonnative speakers. For example, japanese might be one of the hardest languages out there for a native english speaker or so ive often heard, but for a korean person learning japanese. The hungarian language is part of a very different family along with finnish and estonian. Why hungarian is so difficult to learn and why you should. Languages preceded by asterisks are usually more difficult for native english speakers to learn than other languages in the same category. The order of sentences is also different from the languages to which we are accustomed, such as english or french.
Hungarians are the worst in foreign languages in the eu, and its because for a hungarian to learn foreign languages is about as hard as to learn hungarian for a foreigner. The easiest and hardest languages to learn infographic. This ranking takes into account not only the language itself but also the cultural aspect that comes with learning any language, so it is perhaps no surprise the most difficult language would come from a culture that is also notoriously difficult for westerners to adjust to. Hungarian is a bit of a strange and different language in europe as it is of a few languages which have no european roots. They also made hungarian into a language that is painfully difficult for english speakers to learn, at least if they want to learn it formally. Scientific tests of the relative difficulty of learning different languages will have. The only other existing ugric languages, and thus the only other languages to which hungarian is closely related, are the remote ostyak and vogul languages of siberia, spoken in an area more than 2,000 miles from hungary. All these possibly unfamiliar elements in hungarian structure originate from a different language philosophy. How to learn any language in six months chris lonsdale. Q8 the writer thinks that learning new writing systems is easy. Hungarian, the most difficult language to learn how to. Hungarian language is also one of the main european languages which were not the part of the indoeuropean languages.
General professional proficiency in speaking s3 and reading 3. Just print this guide as a handy pdf and come back to it later, whenever it suits you. I answer that question in general, and then with regard to native english speakers. If all different spoken dialects of arabic are pulled under this one umbrella term, the estimates are that there can be around 422 million native and nonnative speakers, making it one of the five most widely spoken languages. The 6 hardest languages for english speakers to learn. Presentation of the most difficult languages in the world. Firstly, as a first language, or mother tongue, the differences are unimportant, so the question of how hard a language is to learn only arises in the area of second language. As a professional language instructor whos been teaching the hungarian language for 16 years, zsedely believes its the second most difficult language an english speaker can learn, with mandarin being the first. The worlds most difficult languages and why theyre so hard. Foreign service institute language difficulty rankings are an indication of how long a native english speaker would need to reach proficiency in a number of different languages there five are categories ranked from easiest to the hardest based on how many classroom hours a. Then again you have unique languages such as hungarian, finish, korean, greek, some indian languages, etc that are unique and are probably difficult to learn. Data for languages that are frequently taught to large cohorts of students are probably more reliable than data for languages that are less frequently to small cohorts of students. Worlds most difficult languages to learn 20202021, top. Jul 01, 2019 so what is the hungarian language and why does it bear the badge of being one of the most difficult in the world, for better or worse.
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