KoreanĪs the most spoken language isolate - a language with no demonstrable genealogical relationship to other languages - Korean is an especially unique language. Moreover, subtle cultural elements within Hungarian make it uniquely difficult to learn. In Hungarian, suffixes dictate tense and possession instead of the word order, which is how most European languages tackle the problem. Making the list with 26 cases, Hungarian has some of the most difficult grammar rules you’ll come across. On the plus side, it is somewhat easier to speak than Mandarin.

What makes Japanese more difficult than your average character-based writing system is that thousands of characters have to be learned before being able to write in Japanese to any great extent: Japanese has three independent writing systems - hiragana, katakana, and kanji - which each have a different alphabet. On top of this, Arabic has many different dialects, meaning that the Arabic spoken in Egypt is different from that spoken in Saudi Arabia. This makes translation a much more difficult task in Arabic than most other languages. 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. Add that to the fact that Chinese is a language rich in homophones and full of idioms and aphorisms picked up over the course of its long history, and Mandarin becomes arguably the most difficult language in the world for an English speaker to learn.

Thanks to it being a tonal language, every sound in Mandarin’s phonetic transcription system pinyin has four distinct pronunciations. For an English speaker, however, mastering Mandarin is a tall order. Mandarin is a language within the Chinese language group and is actually the most spoken language in the world. Without further ado, these are our top ten hardest (but most rewarding) languages to learn. Top 10 Hardest Languages For Translators to Learn

Numbers in different languages finland