What is the top 10 most difficult languages in the world?

Answer 1

It partially depends on your native language, because any language that you're born into will naturally seem easier. Here are some languages that I've found to be entirely unique:

Finnish - agh, I don't even know how many noun case endings, verb inflections, articles, and what other knick-knacks there are... and I don't really want to.
Hungarian - 35 case endings... yikes... I'm pretty sure it has Finnish beat.
Tabarassan (a Caucasian language) - 48 case endings... a nightmare, takes the cake for nominal complexity.

Irish Gaelic: Words are twice as long when written as they sound and each consonant has two ways to be pronounced. Not to mention the noun declension and different verb conjugation... sometimes the word changes ENTIRELY in a different declension.

Xhosa - one of several African language known for it's click noises; there's a saying: "Xhosa cannot be translated", the grammar is just as complicated as the pronunciation, and the lexicon is very different.

!Xóõ: a distant relative to Xhosa, it has the most phonemes (perceived sounds) of any known language, with 26 vowels and 83 click sounds, not to mention nasalization... and like Mandarin, it has four tone contours. The phonemic complexity... wow.

Cantonese: Most world languages aren't accustomed to tones, making it hard for outsiders to learn. Cantonese has 8 tonal contours, as opposed to four in Mandarin and five in Vietnamese. With very few word stops (so that most words end in a vowel, n, m, or ng), it can be hard for foreign ears to discern between what word is actually being said.

Iroquoian languages and Siouan languages... a few others, too: chock full of verbs and not so much with nouns, making them very dynamic and changing grammatically; for example, one would have to call a cow, "he who moos". Those who are used to objectifying and classifying the world with nouns may find this difficult.

Punjabi: unlike Native American languages, Punjabi has LOTS of nouns and LOTS of words, even notoriously so. Learning and retaining a lexicon can be hard for any foreign speaker, so I threw Punjabi on the list.

Silbo Gomero (Gomeran Whistle): a language that was whistled across distances using high and low tones (as "vowels") and tonal contours and breaks (as "consonants"). A spoken language accompanied it, but that original language is now extinct. Now, the Gomerans in the Canary Islands have a system to convert Spanish vowels and consonants into whistle patterns, which they now use. Because whistled language relies so heavily on contours, the brain has less to grab on to, making it hard to learn and efficiently understand unless accustomed to it.

French: they're not an arrogant people, per se; in fact, I haven't met a French person that I didn't love... but I speak French. They're known popularly in the English-speaking world as language purists. If you don't say something right, you'll find out, either from a dirty look or being straight up told.

English: our grammar defies logic at times. We use propositions in ways that confuse even other Europeans; example: on drugs... on top of drugs? in love... inside of it how? how are you? i'm good... at what? It's hard for us to see how these can be confusing, but they are to foreigners.

Answer 2

maximum necessary: (a million) English (2) Spanish (3) French (4) Russian (5) chinese language (6) German (7) eastern (8) Arabic (9) Portuguese (10) tie Italian (10) tie Hindi/Urdu toughest (relies upon on what you already be responsive to) (a million) Basque (2) Hungarian (3) Gaelic (Irish or Scottish) (4) Welsh (5) chinese language (6) Arabic (7) Berber (8) Romany (9) Any Eskimo/Aleutian Island Language (10) Finnish lots of the languages listed above as toughest could be stressful because of the fact they are disimiliar to English/ chinese language has an undemanding grammar, yet tones and the writing device could be confusing. Basque could be stressful because of the fact it so so distinctive than the different language.

Answer 3

1 Chinese (amazingly hard)

2 English (it's not hard if you grow up speaking it. It's my second language, and I just lucked out by coming to the US when I was young enough to pick up the subtle parts of this crazy yet beautiful language.)

3 Japanese (beautiful to listen to, ugly to learn)

4 Arabic (I admire just about anyone who speaks it!)

5 Hungarian (It has almost nothing in common with any language in the world. I'm part Hungarian, and my grandfather speaks it. It's just crazy.)

6 Russian (the most beautiful language I've ever heard.)

7 Finnish (a grammatical nightmare.)

8 Swahili (African language. When was the last time you met someone who learned Swahili? I can't remember, since I only met native speakers!)

9 French (this depends what language you start out learning. I speak German, but French is so different from that that I have a hard time learning it.)

10 Hebrew (It's well-structured, but hard to get used to)

Answer 4

I would imagine it depends on several factors, primarily your own linguistic background, because different languages are structured differently.

If your first language is English, for example, you're going to have some difficulties learning a language such as German or French. Old English, like modern German, was a moderately inflected language with grammatical gender and a grammatical case system. Over the last millennium or so, English has gradually lost many of these features, to the point where it has only remnants of them today, and so native English speakers aren't as used to these ideas as are native speakers of languages that have these features in abundance. Finnish has fifteen noun cases, while German has only four. Some languages use the perfect tense to indicate past tense, and in such languages, there will be language-to-language variances in terms of which verbs take the equivalent of "to have" in such conjugations and which ones take "to be" (German examples would be "Ich habe geschrieben" and "Ich bin gewesen"). And Spanish presents the "ser/estar" question.

Asian languages are more difficult for native English speakers, and it's not just because of the orthography either. Japanese, for example, uses particles to indicate things such as the topic of a sentence ("wa"), a state of "to be" that is tacked onto some adjectives ("o", if I'm not mistaken), or even some punctuation (the particle "ka", for example, roughly corresponds to our question mark)--and it has nuances that express how a person feels about the topic, nuances that can hardly be expressed in English. And its system of numbering things is complex and, to some degree, item-specific--the word for "forty", for example, would be different depending on whether you're counting apples or steel beams.

How easy or difficult a language can be to learn can also depend on how many cognates it has to your own. Sometimes cognates between two languages mean the same thing in both languages--"the lamp" and German "die Lampe", for example. On the other hand, sometimes a word in one language might be a cognate for a different word in the other language--for example, in German "the table" is "der Tisch", which is a cognate for "the dish".

Of course, orthography can present a problem depending on the language. If your first language and the language you're learning both use the Roman alphabet or some form(s) of it, then that hurdle is already cleared for the most part--all you have to worry about is the differences in pronunciation and perhaps a few extra letters (for example, if you're learning Icelandic or Ga or Bokmål Norwegian). But if your first language uses the Roman alphabet and you're learning a language such as Greek or Russian or Hebrew or Chinese, then you have to learn a whole new system of orthography.

So I don't really think there is a definitive list of the "top ten" because the top ten will be different for everyone.

Answer 5

1- Chinese (different way of saying a word = different meaning)
2- Japanese (3 different alphabets)
3- Korean
4- Ancient Hebrew (no vowels)
5- German (declinations)
6- Italian (totally irregular)
7- Danish
8- French
9- Hindi
10- Afrikaan

Answer 6

English appears to be the most difficult for you.

Answer 7

Hebrew!!
(it is much more difficult than Arabic for me)

Answer 8

I would have to say French .. You have to pronounce everything perfectly ,otherwise you have people laughing and correcting you all the time.

Chinese
Japanese
Arabic
Korean
Russian
Indian

Answer 9

italian most romantic language

Answer 10

chinese tops the list unless your chinese.
Some say english is hard but not if you grow up speaking it.