MISSION IMPOSSIBLE? These Are The Most Difficult Languages In The World To Learn

The easiest way to learn a language is to be born and grow up in a particular community where it is spoken. However, this has not stopped people from picking up other languages alien to their native land or country.

However, there are certain languages in the world that pose a great challenge for people, especially English speakers, to learn. Here are 20 of them:

1. Finnish

Finnish has a reputation for being a tricky language to learn, and with good reason. Nouns have 15 different cases, while English has only three: subjective, objective, possessive.

2. Russian

There are some definite roadblocks to becoming flu

ent in Russian, among them being that spelling isn’t always straightforward, it’s full of vowel sounds unfamiliar to the average English speaker, and it requires learning an entirely new alphabet to master.

3. Vietnamese

Unusual grammar, difficult pronunciation, and six different tones make Vietnamese a challenge for English speakers. Expect to spend around 1,100 hours in class to attain speaking and reading proficiency, according to the Foreign Service Institute.

4. Mongolian

The trickiest part of Mongolian is the pronunciation. Once you’ve got that down, the grammar’s not so hard, as long as you know Finnish, and the alphabet’s a breeze, assuming you can read Russian. If you don’t meet those two criteria, though, it is a very challenging language to master.

5. Hungarian

Hungarian is a member of the same small language family as Finnis

h, so the average English speaker won’t be finding much familiarity in its vocabulary. It also has 18 cases and 14 vowels, which makes saying things right particularly difficult.

6. Thai

It isn’t the grammar that will bog you down when you’re trying to learn Thai, it’s the writing and the pronunciation, which has five different tones and long and short vowel sounds.

7. Icelandic

Words in this language can be very long and deciphering how to pronounce them can defy intuition. It’s frequently listed as one of the more difficult languages to learn for English speakers.

8. Estonian

Estonian is the third and final language in that tricky class with Hun

garian and Finnish on this list, and it’s packed with a whopping 14 noun cases. In addition to that, consonants and vowels have three distinct lengths: short, long, and overly long.

9. Georgian

Georgian has its own writing system that no other language uses. And a lot of the letters look surprisingly similar. For example, ვ, კ, პ, ჰ, ყ, ფ, გ, and ც are all different letters that you might have a hard time distinguishing between if you’re new to the game.

10. Czech

Each letter in Czech only has one pronunciation ever. Also, Čtvrtek means Thursday, and mastering the way each of those sounds works together is going to take you a while.

11. Albanian

Albanian’s 36-letter alphabet should clue you in that attempting to m

aster this language is going to be a wild ride. In addition, the grammar is filled with exceptions to the rule that you’ll have to remember, too.

12. Turkish

Turkish is pretty foreign to English speakers, but if you speak Japanese, Korean, or Finnish (which are all also on this list), you won’t have such a hard time grasping it.

13. Polish

The pronunciation in Polish is what will get you. There are a lot of sounds that simply aren’t present in the English language and require a lot of practice to master.

14. Navajo

Navajo is hard enough to figure out that code talkers in World War II used the language to d

evelop a code for communicating that the Germans wouldn’t be able to track.

15. Greek

The most obvious impediment to learning Greek is the alphabet. The grammar can also be a little tricky, with lots of rules, and gendered nouns. And pronunciation requires some practice because there are sounds that don’t have an equivalent in English.

16. Korean

Being able to speak Korean is quite a challenging task, thanks to grammar that is totally different from English and pronunciation that is laden with difficult-to-master rules.

17. Mandarin

The alphabet is made of very elaborate characters; the language is tonal; there are lots of idi

oms, and the ability to speak the language doesn’t help you read it. Knowing how to read it doesn’t even particularly help learn how to write it. It’s not for the faint of heart.

18. Japanese

The first obstacle to learning Japanese is the writing system, which will provide you with no clues unless you also speak Chinese. The grammar seems like it’s very simple, but Japanese also uses particles, which are markers for parts of speech that do not have an English equivalent.

19. Cantonese

Because of its pictorial writing system, you aren’t going to be able to learn to read phonetically. In addition, because Mandarin is the simplified version of Cantonese and is widely used across mainland China, there simply aren’t as many resources for learning Cantonese.

20. Arabic

To learn Arabic, you have to learn a new alphabet and get used to reading from right to left. A lot of the sounds in