7 Most Confusing Languages for English Speakers
Looking for precise and professional language translation? Look no further! I specialize in accurately translating English to Haitian Creole, French, and Spanish.
Trust me to deliver exceptional results that capture the essence of your message. Contact me today for flawless language translations.
🫤 Think your native language is difficult? I found 7 confusing languages that are sure to make your head spin. These languages have crazy conjugations, confusing word order, and verbs that will keep you up at night! Do you already know one of these languages? Brag in the comments and share your secret to success.
📺 WATCH NEXT:
How Long Does It REALLY Take to Learn a Language? 👉🏼
⬇️ GET MY FREE STORYLEARNING® KIT:
Discover how to learn any foreign language faster through the power of story with my free StoryLearning® Kit 👉🏼
✍🏼 ON THE BLOG:
Prefer reading to watching? We’ve got you covered!
11 Hardest Languages for English Speakers 👉🏼
💻 CERTIFICATE OF ONLINE LANGUAGE TEACHING (CEOLT)
Interested in teaching English or another language online? Check out my premier language-teaching course 👉🏼
📖 LEARN A LANGUAGE THROUGH THE POWER OF STORY:
Stories are the best way I have found to learn ANY language. Forget the boring textbooks and time-wasting apps and learn a language the natural, effective way with one of my story-based courses. 👉🏼
🗣 SUPERCHARGE STORIES WITH SPEAKING PRACTICE
Many StoryLearning students have found great success combining story-based learning with 1-on-1 speaking practice. We recommend LanguaTalk for finding talented tutors who can help you become more confident.
Book a free trial with a 5-star tutor here 👉🏼
📚 RESOURCES:
Want to dive into Welsh or Icelandic short stories? We’ve got just the books for you!
👉🏼
⏱ TIMESTAMPS:
0:00 – Confusing Languages Ahead . . .
0:21 – Welsh
4:32 – Czech
7:44 – Hungarian
10:32 – Icelandic
14:47 – Basque
17:51 – Georgian
20:35 – Navajo
📜 SOURCES & ATTRIBUTIONS:
🎬 Video Clips:
How about these impossible languages? 👉 https://youtu.be/2rxA-GBYJb0?si=MvvwxCzG9n1KJ8x8
How about a hungarian short stories book? If you can do a welsh one I’m sure hungarian won’t be much trouble.
How about Malayalam language official language of state of Kerala
9:15 Did you use Google translate? That sentence is incorrect. And _tehénül_ doesn’t mean _as a cow._ I have other problems with this video too.
@@gabor6259, If “tehénül” is not translated to “as a cow”, how should “tehénül” then be translated?
@@riddick7082 _Tehénül_ means ‘in the cow language’.
‘As a cow’ would be _tehénként._
The Icelandic guy is reading a Moomin book😃That was of course originally written in Swedish by the Finnish author Tove Jansson.
Yes! I noticed that, too! 🙂
Well la dee da
Yes, of course. Why the need to state the obvious?🤷♂️
I’m still hoping Olly will make a dedicated video about Finnish.
@@nicholasschroeder3678might not be obvious to everyone
Nah, Welsh is easy. I’m sure our intelligent neighbours can get their heads around a few rare sounds and slightly strange grammar. Don’t put yourselves down, Tolkien was practically fluent in Middle Welsh, Old English, Breton, Finish and so on.
And, belive it or not, Welsh can indeed be spoken about without making tired jokes.
Seven vowel letters: a e i o u w y, consonant mutation (a feature of English, see Knife > Knives, Hoof >Hooves). Easy peasy, stop being scared of it.
It’s the consonant mutation at the FRONT of the word that throws people. Knife to knives is recognizable, though people still have to learn it through memorization and kids screw it up all the time. There isn’t an example that I can think of in English where the beginning of a word changes and it’s still considered the same word.
I think a part the problem is with the way the language is written.
It’s simply too phonetic.
For example they can use ċat for instead of gat and ĉat instead of chat so the learners can understand that they are related to “cat”.
That’s why I’ve been learning Welsh for 650 days straight. It’s a good language to learn, highly regular and phonetic. I love it for it’s simplicity which is disguised by so-called difficult mutations which are mostly soft mutations and the plurals you eventually get the gist. Great language to learn first. Dw i’n dysgu Cymraeg ar hyn o bryd a mwynhau hi fawr iawn. I probably butchered that sentence but I’ll work it out. Hwyl.
Consonant mutations aren’t all that complex. In the various Celtic languages, it’s usually because at some point a preceding word ended in a nasal (nasal mutation) or a vowel, but that final sound got lost, but its echo persisted in the word that followed it. This later got grammaticalised.
In a way, you can see something similar happening in French over time via liaison. It hasn’t developed into a system of initial mutations yet, but it could do under the right circumstances.
Anyhoo, the really weird thing Welsh has is singulatives, where the singular is marked by an infection and the plural is the root form. A good example would be coed/coeden, where the former mean “group of trees; wood” and the latter means “tree”.
Singulatives. That’s an interesting one. I wonder if certain things in English count as singulatives. For example cattle/head of cattle; staff/member of staff; team/team member; crew/crew member.
I have a course on Cherokee that i have been trying to learn. So honestly Navajo just seems mind blowing. Thank you for including an American indigenous language in your list.
Sign up for Ed Fields free online Cherokee lessons. They’re the best! If you can’t attend live, you can watch the replay and still get certified. The sign up is at the main website for the Cherokee Nation (Oklahoma)—check for the “language” tab at the top header.
whats the name of the course
@@schoolingdiana9086 is it the adult immersion classes or the online classes?
What was this person using before?
During WWII, the U.S. Marine Corps (with the assistance of 29 Navajo marines) created a code based on the Navajo language. The code is said to have been critical to the victory at Iwo Jima, and the code remained unbroken at the end of the war. The Navajo “Code Talkers” could translate 3 lines of English in 20 seconds … as opposed to the 30 minutes it took to translate the same material using a code breaking machine to translate from a standard code.
It is a great and true story. It’s Iwo Jima, btw.
@@nicholasschroeder3678 Doggone autocorrect!
The idea of using the Navajo language came from an American who grew up with the Navajos when his parents were missionaries. Very few, non-Navajos can speak that language. The code-talking language was derived from Navajo words but even natives couldn’t understand it without training. The Japanese tried but they never cracked the code.
https://youtu.be/mtkFpEB90qI?si=51STtbrcOnaK19FV – Olly’s video about the code talkers is great.
https://youtu.be/mtkFpEB90qI?si=51STtbrcOnaK19FVn- Here’s the Navajo code talkers full story from Olly.
Missed opportunity to mention that the word “robot” itself is of Czech origin. Thanks for the interesting video, though! 🙂
Even more interesting fact about that is, that Karel Čapek originally thought about a word “labor” which basically is the same as English word “labourer” and would sound same mechanic and foreign to Czechs as the word robot (as we ourselves do not get naturally its etymology and relation to the word “robota” meaning a hard slavery work). Had his brother Josef not convince him to use the neologism robot instead, this widely known term might be very different now and Czechs would lose an international word of their own.
From a play by a Czech writer (Capek)
cool!
@@pohlpiano In the territory of the Hungarian kingdom, the word robot meant work performed in the form of tax to the landlord.
@@tamaslukacs3173 Thanks for the perspective, great to know! I believe it used to be similar in the Bohemian Kingdom as well, with the noun “robota” and also related verb “robotovat”, perhaps after some time turning into the colloquial use I mentioned before (the word robota is still in use nowadays, though fading).
Native American languages are on another level. Many of the Algonquian languages have a similar complexity to Athabascan languages–Ojibwe and Potowatomi are two languages that code various levels of meaning into a word, so much so that a single consonant change can alter the entire meaning or grammatical function of a word (or sometimes both)
It’s amazing how the children learn these “difficult languages” just like we learn English.
I like Seth Meyer pronouncing “volcano”. He’s good at languages 🙂
A meta joke on his part, maybe? 🙂
That was very funny.
He nailed that hard C for sure. 👍
A travel author was having lunch in a Hungarian cafe when a group of schoolchildren aged about 7 years came in. He was amazed that they spoke Hungarian so well!
@@ktipuss I’m from Texas. Several years ago I was in France on a business trip. At the mall I saw little kids with their parents speaking French! Amazing !
hungarian is actually surprisingly logical and hungarian cases are NOT like slavic languages because there’s no gender in Hungarian and many hungarian cases correspnd to prepositions in other languages
Yes, their cases are more like postpositions glued to the nouns.
I don’t speak Hungarian, but I’ve learned vowel harmony in Finnish and Turkish, which are logical and very pleasant to hear. Another thing: Those two languages and Hungarian don’t have genders. So, they have left out the categorization and sexism that most other European languages demand. Stress: I have a feeling that the stress almost always falls on the first syllable. The stress will change if the vowel is long but in Hungarian the long vowel is always shown. It’s totally different from Russian where the stress can fall anywhere and worse, it’s NOT shown…
no gender? it almost makes me want to learn it. if i could speak hungarian i’d be eligible for citizenship from my hungarian grandmother
@@gmalcolms you should seriously consider it
I’m a Welsh learner – it’s not that hard and it’s a great language
I can’t help sensing a degree of prejudice in the video.
Diddorol iawn. Dw i’n dysgu Cymraeg ar hyn o bryd. Probably butchered that. Agree. It’s a great language and it’s phonetic and highly regular. Hwyl
@@lcolinwilson8347Na! It’s a video about complex Languages so it may appear prejudiced. It’s a compliment to this great language. As andrewwoodgate said it’s not that hard once you master the mutations and plurals.
@@gandolfthorstefn1780 : Welsh isn’t a complex language, though. It has its quirks, like every other, but isn’t that hard. “Glyndyfrdwy” isn’t difficult to pronounce, although he implies that it is. Really, he should know better.
@@lcolinwilson8347Diawn. It’s just the w which if it was an e or an a he wouldn’t have bothered putting it there. I wish they would stop implying pronunciation is hard. It’s not.
As a hungarian, I would rather say that sentence as “tehénként” for “as a cow” instead of “tehénül”. From the latter, I associate to their language, so that would mean “in the language of cows”.
yeap
Hungarian and Georgian are such beautiful languages
Love from Sweden
It’s amazing how people can grow up and be fluent in these complex languages. Even that seems like a miracle.
Ever tried chinese?
its not a miracle. i know some languages have easier grammar some have harder grammar but we all learn our native language automatically and dont think if its complex. im slovak (the video mentioned czech so i can talk about slovak) and all these different forms, declensions, conjugations are a pattern, you hear all the words since you are a kid and its just natural to speak correctly, but to be honest we make some mistakes, for example people confuse “svojim” with “svojím”, “naň” with “naňho”, you should say “v maile” not “v maili” etc. but i think natives make mistakes in every language
@@jyrkilehtinen9886 Nah
Finnish fits in with Hungarian; The same family, and just as confusing. I don’t know if I’ll ever be completely fluent. 😅 I’m still hoping you’ll make a dedicated video about it soon…
Also, a Finnish singer I like posted a picture once of a sign in Welsh while his band was on tour in Wales and asked if that’s how Finnish looks to foreigners. One of of the responses was “Finnish is what happened to all the missing vowels in Welsh.”
A Finnish author was once asked how similar Finnish is to Hungarian. His response was : “As similar as English is to Russian”.
@@ktipuss The vocabulary is not the same, that’s true. But the grammar and certain other features like the vowel harmony are extremely similar, and they are still in the same language family, however far they’ve diverged from each other, just like English and Russian; same family, different branches.
I already knew from the title that Hungarian would be here, yayyy.
Ancient Greek? Verbs? Active Middle, Passive voice? ✓ Infinitives? How about 3 voices and 5 tenses ✓ Ditto for participles. ✓Verbal tense, aspect, and mood? ✓4 moods indicative, subjunctive, optative and imperative ✓ 3 genders ✓ 3 numbers singular, dual and plural ✓Lots of articles and prepositions ✓ Complex grammar. Just saying.
welcome to the small group of languages with dual form.
Well, at least it is Indo-European, in contrast to several of the here listed languages.
As a French speaker welsh changing certain sounds just to make things flow better feels quite relatable 😂
Czech is extremely regular. These words don’t mean “woman”, they mean “woman”, “the woman” (object), “the woman’s”, “to the woman” etc. It’s easy to learn these cases.
I started learning Hungarian this year. I was NOT surprised by how different it is in structure because I was expecting that. I was also expecting the vocabulary to be very different. I was expecting all this because people always talk about it. What I was not expecting was how regular and predictable it is. Having learned Russian I find the verbs a lot less irregular in Hungarian. I also find the many cases to be more like just adding a preposition to the end of the word. In Russian you have to learn the preposition and then what case it takes. In Hungarian the case plays the role of the prepostion so there is only one thing to learn. Also there are no genders and adjectives only have two possible forms. So is Hungarian impossibly difficult? No. It’s different and takes a lot of practice but it’s just so logical.
Agglutinative languages are generally really regular because one piece of inflection only ever does one thing, and you just add bits of inflection on the root like building lego. They’re pretty much like small helper words in English that just get appended to the root instead. Makes for a lot of cases, but stupidly regular compared to fusional languages like Romance and Slavic ones.