What Are The Hardest Languages to Learn?

TRAN? Ah..yes? WHÂT ARE THË HARDEST ŁANGÚAGEŠ TÒ LÊARÑ? A look at which languages are easiest and most difficult for English speakers to pick up. THE FOREIGN SERVICE INSTITUTE OF THE U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE COMPILES LEARNING EXPECTATIONS FOR MANY LANGUAGES BASED ON THE AMOUNT OF TIME IT TAKES A NATIVE ENGLISH SPEAKER TO ACHIEVE SPEAKING AND READING PROFICIENCY. Each Learner Is Different The time it takes to learn a language depends on a number of factors: • How close the new language is to your native language or other languages you • How many hours each week you devote to learning the language know • The language learning resources available to you • How complex the language is • Your motivation Easy To achieve 23-24 575-600 language proficiency. weeks class hours Languages Closely Related to English Spanish Dutch Netherlands Spain Español Nederlands 329m 21.7m Portuguese Swedish Português Svenska Sweden Portugal 178m 8.3m French Afrikaans South Français France Afrikaans Africa 67.8m 4.9m Italian Norwegian Italiano Italy Norsk Norway 61.7m | Ч. Бm Romanian Română Romania Number of native 23.4m L speakers, in millions Medium To achieve 44 language proficiency.. 1,110 class hours weeks Languages With Significant Differences From English Hindi Thai farat Ina India Thailand 182m 20.4m Russian Serbian Serbia Pyccknň Russio Српски 1ЧЧт 16.4m Vietnamese Greek Tiếng Việt Vietnam EMAnviKá Greece 68.6m 13.1m Turkish Hebrew Türkçe Turkey Israel 50.8m 5.3m Polish Finnish Finland Poland Polski Suomi ЧОm number of native ICOUNTRY LANDMASSES NOT COMPARATIVELY SCALED) speakers, in millions Hard To achieve 1.69 years (88 weeks) 2,200 class hours Languages That Are Difficult for Native language proficiency.. English Speakers 日本語 122 million I native speakers 221 million Arabic native speakers Japanese Country with greatest number of speakers: Country with greatest number of speakers: ЕGУРТ JAPAN Why it's so difficult: Like Chinese, Japanese language Why it's so difficult: Arabic has very few words that resemble those of European languages. Written learners need to memorize thousands characters. Three different writing systems and two syllabary e language's difficulty. Arabic also uses fewer vowels, which can be difficult for those learning to read the language. systems add to 中文 한국어 1.2 billion 66.3 million Chinese native speakers Korean native speakers Country with greatest number of speakers: Country with greatest number of speakers: CHINA SOUTH HOREA Why it's so difficult: Chinese is a tonal language, Why it's so difficult: Different sentence structure, in which meaning changes as you change the tone syntax, and verb conjugations make learning Korean of a word. Plus, thousands of characters and a difficult for native English speakers. Written Korean complex writing system make learning Chinese a formidable task. also relies on many Chinese characters. SOURCES: Interagency Language Roundtable, Al-Bab.com, MyLanguages.org, Google Translate, VOXY Ethnologue.com, Foreign Service Institute, Wikipedia