The four most difficult languages for English speakers
Last updated: October 9, 2024
When most people think about learning a language, they look for the easy ones — but you want to learn a hard one.
Or maybe you've heard that Mandarin or Arabic is much "harder" than Spanish or French, and you're wondering what, exactly, makes a language difficult.
In this post we'll get into:
What makes a language difficult to learn?
Again, any article that claims that there is a most difficult language contains some major bias, but if we wanted to try to be objective about it, we could analyze a language in several different ways.
Distance from your native language
Like people, modern languages can also be traced back to an "ancestor", which is called a "proto-language". Languages that descend from the same proto-language are considered to be in the same language family.
Languages from the same family tend to be more similar: English and German have a lexical (vocabulary) overlap of 60%, for example. This means that English speakers learning German will enjoy many advantages that learners of, say, Korean, will not have.
Language features
When most people talk about a language being difficult, they're referring to things like pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary. These things are called "structural features", and there are almost 200 of them.
Generally speaking, the complexity of these features balance each other out:
All languages have a complex grammar: there may be relative simplicity in one respect (e.g. no word endings), but there seems always to be relative complexity in another (e.g. word position). — David Crystal, 1987
For example, here is an in-depth (but technical) overview of Japanese's 151 structural features and Mandarin's 153 features.
Cultural differences
Communication is much more than simply stringing words together: different cultures have different values, expectations about how communication should occur, and norms in terms of what is/isn't acceptable to talk about.
For example, speakers of high-context cultures tend to prefer indirect styles of communication, so natives learn to "read the room". Natives of low-context cultures, on the other hand, expect people to say what they mean and mean what they say. Learning to navigate this different approach to communication is an additional hurdle on top of the language itself.
Availability of resources
If you ask somebody what they think a hard language is, they'll likely say Mandarin or Russian or Arabic... but, hard as they may be, people eventually do learn these languages. Mary Hobson started learning Russian at age 56 and went on to be become a renowned translator of Pushkin.
In contrast, you then have languages like Sentinelese, which not a single non-native has ever learned to even a basic level. Understandably, this is because the Sentinelese live on a remote island, refuse contact with the outer world, and are (violently) hostile to visitors.
While most languages aren't literally confined to islands, not all languages have the same quantity or quality of resources available. This may not matter to linguists, but it does matter to learners.
Prominence on a global level
Ethnologue, a catalogue of the world's languages, has entries for 7,164 languages. If you clicked around the World Atlas of Structured Languages (WALS) mentioned in the "language features" section, this number might give you pause: WALS only has entries for 2,662 languages. In other words, we know so little about ~2/3 of the world's languages that not one person in a global team of linguists was able to write a brief overview of those languages' features.
The reason for this discrepancy is straightforward: while there are many languages in the world, most of them do not see wide enough use to be known outside of their respective communities. Roughly 66% of the world's population speaks one of just ten languages.
If you're learning a less common language, your journey will be complicated by the simple fact that you'll struggle to find any opportunities to use it or media to consume in it.
Is there a "most" difficult language?
There are three answers to this question:
- Objectively speaking, probably not: Languages can be simple and complex in many ways, and these factors balance out. Native speakers of different languages end up hitting similar developmental milestones at roughly similar ages. (See the individual studies in The Crosslinguistic Study of Language Acquisition).
- Subjectively speaking, probably: Certain languages will likely be easier or harder for a given person to learn to learn, depending on their native language. We'll talk about this in more detail below.
- Practically speaking, yes: the most difficult language in the world is the first foreign language you try to learn. Learning this language will require you to also solve many practical problems about how to learn a language. If you move a third language, all of this practical know-how will come along with you, making the process much easier.
Anecdotally speaking, it took me 8 years to read my first book in Spanish, but only two in Japanese. I often felt lost while learning Spanish, but when I moved onto Japanese, I had a clear idea of what stood between me and my first book and how I could get over all of the hurdles along the way.
The most difficult languages to learn (for English speakers)
It turns out that we do have a pretty clear data about which languages are the most difficult, so long as we're willing to make two major concessions:
- We omit the ~4,500 languages which linguists have virtually no data about, and thus can't be discussed, and also couple thousand other more minor languages that a typical person likely isn't going to encounter
- We pick one language as a starting point, as language A might be very difficult for native speakers of language B but very easy for speakers of language C
With this in mind, the U.S. Government's Foreign Service Institute trains diplomats in over 70 languages. Since its founding in 1947, we've gathered data on the progress of tens of thousands of learners, and four languages in particular have stood out as being particularly difficult.
On average, learning these languages to a level of fluency in which diplomats can do their daily duties abroad takes ~2,200 in-class hours and roughly double that many hours of additional practice outside of class.
Arabic
The first challenge with learning Arabic is that it likely means learning two languages:
- Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), the language of books, news, and academia, and also the language used when speakers of two different dialects interact
- A regional dialect, of which there are over 20 (shown in the below photo), and what people use to communicate in day-to-day life
And from here, several challenges arise for English speakers:
- Language family: Arabic is a Semitic language, meaning that virtually no words will be recognizable
- Word order: Verbs come at the very beginning of sentences in Arabic, before the subject of the sentence
- Noun forms: Arabic nouns and adjectives have grammatical case, meaning that you cannot use a noun without (a) knowing exactly what grammatical function it plays in a sentence and (b) changing its form accordingly
- Verb forms: Arabic verbs are highly inflectional, with each root containing up to 2,000 possible forms
- Writing system: The Arabic alphabet is a kind of Abjad: short vowels are not written and it is not clarified whether a consonant is single or double, effectively meaning that you must know how a word sounds before you can read it
- Counting: Arabic doesn't just have single and plural, but also a "dual" form which is used when there are two of something
- Pronunciation: Arabic has a few uvular (throat) sounds that will be foreign to English speakers, and makes regular use of the glottal stop (the pause in the middle of "uh-oh"), which English speakers may struggle to hear
Mandarin
Even people who don't know anything about Mandarin know two of the main things that make it difficult:
- Tones: Mandarin has four tones (high, low-rising, low, low-rising) plus a neutral tone. We actually use tones in English, too (say no! and then no?), but whereas we use tone to express emotion, in Mandarin there's also a fixed tone associated with each character/syllable. To learn more, check out our deep dive on Chinese Tones.
- Chinese Characters: Our alphabet is phonetic, meaning each letter represents a sound, but Chinese characters are logographic, meaning each character represents a word or idea. You often can't guess the pronunciation of an unknown character just by looking at it, and you'll need to learn several thousand unique characters.
But as you begin learning Mandarin, you'll realize that there are many more challenges waiting for you:
- Simplified vs Traditional: China simplified its character set in the mid-20th century, and these characters are used in China, Singapore, Malaysia, and the UN. The traditional (unsimplified) characters are still used in Taiwan. Sometimes the characters are the same (as with I 我 or moon 月 ), sometimes the characters look quite similar in shape (as with horse: 马 in simplified, 馬 in traditional), and sometimes they look very different (as with book: 书 in simplified, 書 in traditional).
- Sentence structures: It's commonly said that Chinese languages have simple grammar, and this is true in that you don't need to conjugate verbs or decline nouns. The cost of this inflectional simplicity is that word order and sentence structure is very important in Mandarin. The language's structures won't always feel natural to native English speakers, and small changes can lead to big differences in meaning.
- No shared vocab: Learners of European languages enjoy thousands of shared vocabulary words — valence electron is Valenzelektron in German — but you don't get these freebies in Chinese. You start from zero.
- Difficult-to-distinguish sounds: Chinese has a few new sounds that will sound very similar to native English speakers. Compare sh in 诗 (poem), vs ch in 吃 (eat), or u in 五 (five) vs ü in 雨 (rain).
- Particles and complements: Mandarin uses a variety of particles and complements to express meaning. While some of these are very simple — to make a statement a question, just add the question particle 吗 to the end of the sentence — many will take adjustment.
Korean
Korean is often considered to be the easiest of the Chinese, Japanese, Korean bunch because it doesn't have tones or require you to learn Chinese characters, but we can view this from another direction: FSI data shows it takes as long to learn as Japanese or Mandarin, despite the fact that it doesn't have tones or characters. The language contains other challenges for learners:
- Honorifics: Honorifics refer to language that communicates status or respect. In English, we use individual words like "sir" or "please" to do this. In Korean, there are ~7 types of honorific language, each one with its own situations for use, word forms, and sometimes even unique vocabulary. While optional in English, honorifics are mandatory in Korean; it is not possible to talk to someone without acknowledging their status relative to yours.
- Spelling: Like English, and unlike surprisingly many languages, Korean has very flexible phonotactics. Combine this with a frightening amount of letters that change sounds in certain situations (discussed below) and a few letters that have come to represent the same sound, and you'll find that you often can't predict how a new word is spelled just by listening to it.
- Sound changes: Mentioned above in the section on spelling, many Korean letters can sound in multiple ways depending on the context in which they appear. For example, that plain /t/ sound ㄷ sounds like a "t" in the beginning of a word but like a "d" in the middle of a word. Compare: (a pluralizing suffix) and (son). This becomes intuitive after a while, but there are several dozen rules to remember.
- Three-way plosives: Korean plosives (/k/, /t/ and /p/, sounds in which air "explodes" out of your mouth) come in three variants. For example, the "plain" /t/ (ㄷ ) sounds like the "t" in "tent"; the "double" or "tense" /t/ (ㄸ ) sounds kind of like the "t" in "latency" or "sty"; and the "aspirated" /t/ (ㅌ ) sounds like the "t" in "tent", but with much more airflow. Native English speakers struggle to distinguish these sounds, but they're very different to Korean speakers.
- Sentence structure: In Korean, verbs come at the end of the sentence: whereas we say I eat pizza, Koreans say I pizza eat. This has a dramatic effect on how information is organized in a sentence, and when trying to make longer sentences, native English speakers will often find themselves in situations where they know all of the words and grammar points they need but don't quite know how to string those words together.
- Left-branching: Branching refers to whether description extends to the left or right of a word. In English, description tends to come after nouns: compare a book with a book that I read. In Korean, all of this description comes before the noun. This, too, leads Korean sentences to be organized in ways that are very different to English ones.
- Inflection: Inflection refers to changing the end of a word to represent certain grammatical concepts, and we use it to express the past tense in English: dance vs danced. Korean has much heavier inflection than English, and some things that would be individual words in English (such as not) are not individual words in Korean. Compare English I did not want to go to Korean . Literally, that's 가 (go) 고 (connecting particle) 싶 (want) 지 (negating particle) 않 (not) 았 (past-tense marker) 어요 (informal, polite marker).
- Lack of shared vocab: As with Chinese and Arabic, Korean vocabulary words have nothing in common with English ones. Thankfully for learners, Korean has been quite liberal about borrowing words, so you'll see familiar words here and there, such as 인터넷 (intonet, internet) or 비타민 (bitamin, vitamin).
- Two number systems: It's only half true to say that Korea doesn't have Chinese characters. A significant portion of its vocabulary comes from Chinese, it just did without the characters. This dual nature leads to some interesting situations where both a Korean and Chinese word exists for the same idea, but the usage or nuance is slightly different. One notable example is numbers: there are Korean numbers and Chinese numbers, and each are used to count different things: hours are Korean, but minutes are Chinese.
Japanese
In newer versions of the Foreign Service Institute's language difficulty rankings, you'll often see Japanese labeled with an asterisk. This is done to indicate that it generally takes more time to learn than Mandarin, Korean, or Arabic.
- Like Mandarin, Japanese also requires you to learn thousands of Chinese characters
- Like Korean, Japanese has a complex system of honorifics and inflection, branches to the right, and often has both Japanese and Chinese words for the same concepts
- Like Arabic, Mandarin, and Korean, Japanese also has virtually no words in common with English
It then has some challenges of its own:
- Multiple pronunciations for each Chinese character: While characters virtually always have only one reading in Mandarin, Japanese characters almost always have at least two: a 訓読み (kun'yomi, Japanese reading) and an 音読み (on'yomi, Chinese reading). Furthermore, Japanese actually borrowed words from multiple Chinese languages, meaning that there are often several possible on'yomi readings available. As such, while you can almost always predict the reading of familiar characters in new Chinese words, this isn't the case with Japanese.
- Reading the Air: The first two cultural words that Japanese students will learn are 建前 (tatemae, publicly-displayed thoughts) 本音 (honne, real feelings). Japan is a high-context culture and communication tends to be more indirect than it is in English, sometimes requiring speakers to "read the air" to find the message behind the message. To give a famous (but exaggerated) example, Natsume Sōseki suggested that I love you should be translated into Japanese the moon is beautiful, isn't it?
- Pitch accent: While Japanese does not have tones like Mandarin does, all Japanese words do follow a pattern of low and high pitches. For example, the word 日本 (ni・ho・n, Japan) is pronounced in a low-high-low pattern. Pronouncing the word with a different pattern of pitches sounds somewhat jarring, as if someone had said JApan instead of jaPAN in English.
- Copyright laws: Japan has quite strict copyright laws that place significant restrictions on how Japanese media may be sold outside of Japan.
- Three writing systems: Japanese writing leverages three writing systems simultaneously. Generally speaking, ひらがな (hiragana) is used for grammar, カタカナ (katakana) is used for words of foreign origin or for emphasis, and (kanji) is used to actually write words. See our post on The Japanese Alphabets to get a closer look at each of these writing systems and how they are used.
- Particles: Japanese uses many particles to string words together and form sentences. For example, the particle を (o) must be attached to direct objects — the thing you're eating, the movie you're watching, the thing you're doing. There are many such particles that explicitly mark words in certain ways, and this can be hard for native English speakers to get used to because we communicate the same information "invisibly" through word order.
!Xóõ, an honorable mention
I won't do a deep dive into !Xóõ because... well, I can't.
All the same, I want to ask you to take a second to scroll through !Xóõ's Wikipedia page. If you do, you'll see that it it has 58–87 consonants, 20–31 vowels, 2–4 tones, and several clicks. The range is because linguists disagree whether certain sounds are individual sounds or groups of sounds, and the incredible number of sounds is because !Xóõ has several "flavors" of sounds that English only has one of. It's OK if the page doesn't make much sense to you: I have a background in articulatory phonetics, and, frankly speaking, !Xóõ scares me.
I've included this because I want to highlight the incredible diversity of languages that exist in the world. There are over 7,000, after all, and each has slightly different tools available to it and preferences as to how those tools be used.
Does learning a language need to be so hard?
I won't lie to you — the above languages are hard. Even if you're looking at an "easier" language like French, the Foreign Service Institute estimates that diplomats will need ~600 in-class hours and 1,200 hours of extracurricular practice to reach fluency.
What makes learning languages even harder is that many traditional methods of language learning aren't super effective. Textbooks teach you what someone else thinks is important, but those things may or may not actually align with what you need to do the things that are important to you.
And that's why we created Migaku.
We believe that languages are best learned by being used to do cool things, so we built a tool that makes that possible, even for beginners. It works like this:
- Consume content online (scroll on X/Twitter, watch YouTube, read the news, etc)
- If you see a word, just mouse over it — we'll show you a dictionary definition and explain what it means in this sentence
- If you think the word is useful, you can click another button to automatically create a flashcard
- The flashcard gets sent to our app, where we use spaced repetition to transfer the word into your long-term memory
Learning a language will still take a lot of time this way, but it'll also be a lot of fun.
If you want to learn Japanese, Mandarin, or Korean, click any of those links to get a free 10-day trial. It's free, it'll make native content accessible to you, and you'll learn a lot.
Closing thoughts
Languages, ultimately, are tools that evolved to facilitate communication. If a language was really so complex that native speakers regularly found themselves unable to communicate, it would end up changing so that communication became possible. Just think about it: you don't see many cups with holes in the bottom, as that would make them impossible to use it for drinking.
Having said that, different languages organize information in different ways and different cultures have different norms regarding communication, and you will feel like a language is difficult to learn and use if it differs from your own language in important ways.