5 REALLY Hard Languages for English Speakers
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๐ช๐ผ No foreign language is impossible to learn. If you put in enough time and effort, you can definitely get fluent in ANY language you want. But… I must admit that SOME languages are hard. Really, REALLY hard. ๐ฐ In this video, I share 5 of the most difficult languages for native speakers of English, including one that I have learned myself (which you will hear me speak later in the video).
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๐บ WATCH NEXT:
Top 5 Easiest Languages To Learn For English Speakers
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How Navajo Code Talkers Helped Win WWII (The Unbreakable Code)
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๐ RESOURCES MENTIONED:
Even the toughest languages can be cracked through the power of story. Learn how with my free StoryLearningยฎ Kit! ๐๐ผ
โ๐ผ BLOG VERSION:
Want to read about even more difficult languages? Click here:
๐๐ผ
โฑ TIMESTAMPS:
0:00 – Intro
0:18 – Hard Language #5
4:57 – Hard Language #4
9:12 – Hard Language #3
11:43 – Hard Language #2
15:45 – Hard Language #1
๐ SOURCES & FEATURED CLIPS:
WIKITONGUES: Ioanna speaking Greek
The trick to pronouncing Gamma (ฮ,ฮณ) & Chi (ฮง,ฯ) | Easy Greek 9
WIKITONGUES: Lolly speaking Zulu
How to pronounce Zulu Clicks with Sakhile from Safari and Surf – Wilderness Adventures
WIKITONGUES: Orsolya speaking Hungarian
Navajo President speaks
Navajo Consonants
HOW TO SPEAK NAVAJO
WIKITONGUES: Joyce speaking Cantonese
Even the toughest languages can be cracked through the power of story. Learn how with my free StoryLearningยฎ Kit! ๐๐ผ https://iwillteachyoualanguage.com/kit
Arabic has more sounds than Greek and the Arabic grammar is much difficult
Where did you get the data proving that these languages are the hardest for English speakers to learn? I can tell you that, in the US military, languages are placed into categories (Category 1, Category 2, etc…) with the hardest being placed in Category 4. Those languages are Arabic, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese Mandarin. Of these four languages, Arabic has by far the lowest graduation rate, primarily because of the grammar and the difficulty for English speakers to pronounce Arabic sounds properly.
@ulical yes for example the sound ุถ
do not exist in any other language and there are other hard sounds like
ู ุต ุท ุฎ ุน ุธ
which are difficult for western people to pronouce
Could have warned me about spidersโฆ I accidentally tosses my phone on the wall because of that. >^<
@SALAH EDDINE Yes, that’s completely correct. I speak Arabic myself and the sounds of those letters are what usually get people.
The true “hardest” languages are probably unstudied minority languages in Africa, Americas and Asia, where you’d have to be a trained field linguist to even begin documenting the language in order to learn it.
Nailed it
I’m sure one day Olly will make a video about the hardest languages on earth. ๐
Great point! I’m kind of at the in-between stage, having become interested in the indigenous languages of Russia and the Caucasus, and I’m learning one primarily with the help of native speakers because of the obvious dearth of resources.
In Guatemala we have the Kaqchikel language as an obligatory class.
Nobody in my class speaks kaqchikel, like, for real.
So, kaqchikel is obligatory because the goverment added it to avoid losing the language. BUT, most of our schools don’t really care about teaching it.
Our teachers aren’t really people who speak the language, they’re mostly *ladinos* without any training in the language, they just show what is on their books.
Kaqchikel is not the only language in Guatemala, we have A LOT, and a lot of them are just losing speakers because in our country, instead of trying to acknoledge and love them, racism wins.
Kinda sad, i would really like to understand kaqchikel :(.
yes very true. i wonder where the Hadza tribe’s language would fit on the list for English speakers
Knowing how to read Cyrillic makes Greek writing make a lot more sense
I think of Cyrillic as 60% Latin, 20% Greek, and 20% its own thing.
And then there’s the Coptic alphabet, which is Greek’s with a few extra symbols, though that’s only useful for one ancient, dead language.
I was thinking the same thing. Every character he showed I was like โoh yeah thatโs how the Russians pronounce it tooโ
No really, i can read cyrillic like the back of my hand and looking at Greek is like alien writing to me, and I’ve already spent several days trying to understand and pronounce it where cyrillic took about 30 minutes to master
Not at all to me ๐
I know both alphabets well, some conversational Russian and took a year of Greek. My mom’s family is Greek, my YiaYia taught me the alphabet as a kid, sang me to bed with feggariki mou lambro.
I still have trouble reading Greek words. The letters can stand for so many things. ฯ can even make a “f” sound. ฮตฯ ฯฮฑฯฮนฯฯฯ ฮฮตฯ ฯ etc. I had no clue it could sound like f, i was taught it was a vowel that sounded like “ee”
In short, there are lots of little quirks about modern Greek and it takes more than a simple cursory “learning the rules” to be able to pronounce it. I think the rules might have been simple once upon a time but the language evolved, just like English and not every evolution is treated the same way in spelling. I wish it was more simple “this always makes this sound” but there are so many tricky moments
for those who donโt have time:
#1 cantonese
#2 navajo
#3 hungarian
#4 zulu
#5 greek
*Laughs in Polish*
*laughs in Arabic*
Laughs in Vietnamese
Laughs in Czech
Laughs in URDU lmao
I feel like people who are born speaking Cantonese are so lucky. Itโs just that itโs like one of the hardest languages to learn and we automatically learn it when our language-learning ability is the highestโmerely newborn. Also, most places that speak Cantonese also speaks mandarin and English, like Hong Kong and Macau, therefore we know three languages by heart since we were babies and we donโt even need to put that much effort. (Respect to those who struggle)
้ฆๆธฏไบบ๏ผ๐๐๐
Me too,
I speak Cantonese, Chinese, and English
And I totally understand
Same i learn Cantonese from my dad and all the relatives during Chinese new year . I know Chinese and English and Malay too
gifted basically
Yea I understand but itโs so hard to learn that I get like 62% in my tests
IsiZulu is one of the easiest language to speak, hence when foreigners come to Mzansi, the first language they learn is Zulu. However, IsiZulu that is spoken in KwaZulu-Natal (original Zulu) is different from the one which is spoken in Gauteng (which is mixed with other languages) not that much though. Overall IsiZulu is a nice language, easy to learn, read and understand.
Omg no
Exactly, It’s the easiest to learn than any other language in SA.
@Kgomotso Tlhapane Afrikaans though
@LegoCityFilms I learned Afrikaans in school I still can’t speak it, I don’t know if it’s because I was only exposed to it at school or what๐คทโโ๏ธ
Fellow South Africans, howzit๐
My American friend moved to Hungary a few years ago, and I was astounded that about a couple years into her being there she put up a video of her interpreting an American’s speech into Hungarian. She worked her butt off to get there! I’m so proud of her. ๐
Amazing! The best way to truly learn a new language is to live a couple years in the country.
When I worked at Microsoft, I spent some time on the Complex Script languages (Thai, Arabic, Hebrew, Vietnamese, and Hindi) team even though I only speak English. So Microsoft put us through a crash course in those languages. It was more for fun team building event as knowing the languages didn’t really affect our ability to code and test the software elements we handled. It has been a couple of decades but from what I remember of Thai, it was something like no spaces between words and words at the end of the sentence can change the pronunciation of the words at the beginning that completely broke my brain.
Many Asian languages have no spaces between words. All forms of Chinese (Cantonese, Mandarin, etc.) and Japanese certainly don’t. Japanese is fairly easy, though, in this regard (just hard in every other regard) because concepts are usually separated by particles, so you can roughly guess where words or short bursts of words begin / end.
@vorpal22 As a Vietnamese, I’m surprised some don’t even have spaces. Welp! My bad spacing can come in handy after all!
@AceD_Pikaranian1 The spacing can definitely be very tough in Chinese and Japanese (don’t know about others), but when you reach a certain point, especially in Japanese with the tons of particles, filling in the spacing is easy.
Chinese is easy because words tend to be 1-3 characters.
@AceD_Pikaranian1 But LOL it is amazing how all these languages evolved and almost none of them are easily to learn… in fact, they seem to go out of their way to be hard to learn! Look at English! It’s crazy.
@vorpal22different the English, we put noun then adjective , for example, jacket purple, but there can be things like โdried squidโ instead on some occasions
I can attest to Greek. Im Greek myself and Iโve had MANY struggled attempts trying to learn the language to talk to my family throughout my life haha. Im now finally kind of making progress though and hopefully will learn enough by the time I visit my family in Greece this summer! Im definitely jealous of my family who are native speakers, but Im definitely working hard haha
I feel like Hungarian is another language that is somewhat difficult to translate to English directly without changing the meaning of some things. I say this as someone from Hungary who is fluent in English, there are just words that you can’t really translate directly from one language to the other. For example love in English is defined by context, in Hungarian however, there are multiple words which can mean different kinds of love. It’s also the case for many other languages too, French, German, Italian, Spanish and many others have different words to describe different ways/kinds of love. It’s very interesting from a linguistic point of view.
Thank you for covering Navajo.
As a Korean American i am doubly grateful but also have a sense of guilt.
My gramps fought in the Korean war when the North Koreans allied with China and Russia invaded.
He had the honor of being stationed with Navajo tribesmen and without their dialect, South Korea may look very different now.
As an American i volunteered for the Lummi tribe (closest to my univ) and learned alot. Culture, values, gratefulness. I am Korean though so i was subjected to alot of racism and ignorance but.. i mean you only know how much you learn so can’t blame them.
Thank you, the Navajo people and as an American… sorry to native Americans.
Mixed girl here (mostly black) one of my relatives who is black fought in the Korean War. He ended up learning Korean while he was stationed there. He says Korean people have good fried chicken and are very smart and pretty. I agree. lol
Cantonese is a very difficult language to understand. Even my grandma, who spoke two Hakka dialects, putonghua, Hokkien and could understand Shanghainese had problems understanding Cantonese. She understood some of course, because she had a lot of exposure to it through Cantonese dramas, but her understanding was still very limited.
That’s the opposite of my parents’ experience though. Both my parents, who speak Mandarin and Hokkien, picked up Cantonese fairly easily from watching lots of Cantonese dramas in their teenage years. They told me it was very common among their generation. They still retain much understanding of Cantonese now though they struggle with speaking it.
My dad was from Shanghai and moved to hk when he was 10 I was born in hk and Cantonese is my first language itโs hard to switch from canto to mandarin my English is fluent tho
Finland here. One of the hardest things about learning foreign languages, in my experience, is when something that is very common in your own language is missing from the other language. One of the difficult things about English for me is that English doesn’t have genitive forms for the words “this” and “that”. As a result, some things that are very easy to say in Finnish sometimes result in ridiculously complex sentence structures when translated into English.
As a native Cantonese speaker Iโm very proud Cantonese is on the top of the list
Also heโs not just simply ranking languages according to their difficulties but gives full introduction about that language and reasons
As a native Cantonese speaker, I hope people won’t be scared off from learning Cantonese, it’s really an interesting language. But I’m really struggling when I want to teach my foreign friends Cantonese as I don’t know how I learn it myself. We didn’t have “lessons” in class that teach the grammar, pronunciation etc of it, instead when we’re in class, we just learn a similar word if we ever encounter a new word. My whole Cantonese learning experience is 100% immersive (though I know that there’s definitely some kind of classes that you can take to learn the rules), so yeah, being immersed into a Cantonese environment ins important.
You live in Hong Kong like me
@PAT Countryball same for me
ๅ ถๅฏฆ็ฒต่ชๆ็ฒพ้ซ็ๅฐๆนๆฏ็ฒๅฃw
my mother is from HK, and while i can understand it mostly, i just can’t recall how to speak when i have to speak (the vocabulary, the grammar.. i forget it all). there are very few opportunities for overseas chinese to immerse as you suggested, or at least without guidance. in any case i ended up better at speaking mandarin..
@Sear ๐ xD
As a Slavic language speaker, it sounds like Greek might actually be one of the easier foreign languages to learn for us.
A good bit of similar grammar, mostly similar phonetics and writing system that is pretty straight forward to get a hang of if you already know Cyrillic.
It’s a lot more familiar feeling that English or German grammar at least, and has the added benefit of making you sound smart, even when you’re ordering a gyros in a takeout spot ๐
Lol like me a native English speaker German is soo freaking easy ๐ I love it. It really depends on your mother tongue to determine whatโs and easy language to learn.
@Drrake fax
@Drrake ehm well me as a native german speaker i am always wondering what English native speakers are trying to say in German because it sound so off ๐ It may be you are different but yeah thats my perspective ๐
@Fiona Wildlife lol Iโm sure it does sound off ๐
I was amused to find Hungarian at number 3. I know this is traditionally a difficult language but I lived in Hungary for two years and became quite proficient for a non-native especially in pronunciation. Hungary is a lovely country and I really enjoyed my time there.
We’re glad you enjoyed your time! โบ๏ธ
Yes, to speak on basic not so difficult. And Hungarians adore you, if you try to speak their language…
Speaking is not that hard you learn in a couple of years, the part that is pretty hard is probably grammar
Richard, I agree. I lived in Hungary as a ‘diak’ decades ago in college. The pronunciation is relatively easy for an English speaker. Grammar and everything else difficult. It is an agglutinative language and I think many English/Romance lang speakers initially find that characteristic difficult. But as a Korean speaker, I found this aspect intuitive. Enjoyed my time there. Vislat.
Depends on the origin of English speakers. For Americans the most difficult language is Geography
I took World Geography classes in high school (we learned about the culture as well). I am American.
@Dutchess Dreamer it’s a joke bro chill(i’m american too btw before you say anything)
I am a German speaker and I had problems with English in school and Latin was rather easy to me. But I realised the Easyness of Latin when I started to learn Ancient Greek. I never managed to reach a reasonable speaking level, although I like to hear the language, even more than Latin.
English speakers who move to Israel have a really hard time learning Hebrew. My late husband had learned to read Hebrew well for his bar mitzva, even if he didn’t know what he was reading he could recite perfectly. He struggled to speak for years until I told him, “look, you read well, start reading more and you’ll learn, to speak better” and he did. hebrew grammar is really simple compared to many languages. I could speak better but couldn’t read. He passed a little over 2 years ago so I lost my “eyes” so to speak. I HAD to learn to read and it is starting to come to me. I have some visual difficulty with some of the fonts but simple, modern ones are ok.