If you’re wondering which is the hardest language to learn for English speakers, you’ve come to the right place. According to the U.S. Foreign Service Institute (FSI), native English speakers find Mandarin Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Arabic the most difficult.
But why are these languages the hardest? Let’s explore these four difficult languages in detail to learn what makes them challenging and look at the FSI hours for each language.
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Key Takeaway
- FSI categorizes four languages as the hardest to learn for English speakers, each requiring 2200 classroom hours because of their significant linguistic differences from English.
- Mandarin Chinese is challenging because of its distinctive tones and Chinese characters.
- Japanese combines three separate writing systems and follows a different SOV word order, unlike English’s SVO sentence structure.
- Korean grammar rules are comparatively more challenging to master than English grammar.
- Arabic follows a unique right-to-left script, which is entirely different from English’s Latin alphabet.
1. Mandarin Chinese – Extensive Tonal Language
FSI identifies Mandarin Chinese as the Category V hardest language to learn for English speakers because its linguistic features are entirely different from English. Here are a few Mandarin Chinese features that actually make it a ‘super-hard’ language for native English speakers:
- Mandarin Chinese doesn’t borrow many loanwords or cognates from English, so you won’t find many familiar words. You have to learn many words from scratch.
- Mandarin Chinese follows a tonal system with four main pitches and one neutral tone. This means even a slight pitch change can change a word’s meaning. For example, the base sound shū can have 4 meanings. In the first tone, shū (书) means ‘book’. In the second tone, shú (熟) means ‘cooked’. In the third tone, shǔ (暑) means ‘heat’, and in the fourth tone, shù (树) means ‘tree’.
- Mandarin Chinese uses a logographic writing system, which means it doesn’t have a single alphabet like English. It uses thousands of Chinese characters to form words.
These three aspects of Mandarin Chinese are what actually make it one of the most challenging languages for English speakers. And that’s mainly why it takes more time to master Mandarin Chinese than other languages. FSI hour ranking for Mandarin Chinese is 2200 classroom hours or 88 weeks. However, despite these differences, Mandarin Chinese has very simple grammar rules, such as no complex verb conjugations or grammatical genders, which can be relatively easy to learn.
2. Japanese – Complex Writing Systems
One amazing but challenging aspect of Japanese for English speakers is that it combines three writing systems: Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji. Among these Japanese scripts, Hiragana and Katakana are syllabaries (phonetic), but Kanji uses Chinese characters with meaning. You can even see them together in one sentence, which makes reading Japanese difficult.
For example: I bought bread at the convenience store – watashi wa konbini de pan o kaimashita (私はコンビニでパンを買いました。). Here, Hiragana is used for word endings, Katakana is used for loanwords like konbini (convenience store) and pan (bread), and Kanji is used to represent meaning like watashi (I) and ka (buy).
Japanese grammar is another major area where English speakers struggle the most. Imagine writing ‘I love apples’ as ‘I apples love’. That’s the case with Japanese word order. In Japanese, we write ‘I love apples’ as Ringo ga daisuki desu (私はリンゴが大好きです). Here, daisuki desu is an adjective phrase.
So, Japanese follows the Subject-Object-Verb structure instead of English’s SVO sentence structure. Japanese typically places the verb at the end of the sentence or completely omits it sometimes.
3. Korean – Alphabet Looks Like Syllable Blocks
Korean complex grammar rules and the ‘Hangul’ writing system mainly challenge native English speakers. Like Japanese, Korean also follows SOV word order. That said, in Korean we write ‘I eat rice’ as naneun bab-eul meogeoyo (저는 밥을 먹어요). Here, meogeoyo—’eat’—is a verb that comes at the end of the sentence.
Additionally, Korean uses its own Hangul alphabet, which looks like symbols grouped into syllable blocks. For example, 한국 (Hanguk, Korea) looks like two syllable blocks, but each contains several individual letters. So, the Korean alphabet is completely different from English, but because the sounds are very logical, it’s easier to read. For example, ㅁ is the ‘m’ sound and ㅏ is the ‘a’ sound, so collectively they make the 마 ‘ma’ sound. And because of these challenges, the FSI language difficulty ranking for Korean is Category V.
4. Arabic – Right-to-Left Writing Script
Arabic introduces a whole different writing system to English speakers that’s written from right to left, and many letters change their shape depending on where they appear in a word. And it’s entirely new for English speakers, who are used to left-to-right scripts. For example, we write ‘I eat an apple’ in Arabic as ākulu tuffāhatan (آكل تفاحة). See, the Arabic alphabet runs in the opposite direction.
Now here’s another challenge that English speakers generally face: in Arabic, short vowels (حركات) aren’t often written in everyday writing, so you have to understand the context as you read. For example, آكل تفاحة is pronounced ākulu tuffāhatan. To make it clearer, short vowels in Arabic are small marks like the ‘u’ sound ḍamma (ُ) or ‘a’ sound fatḥa (َ) in the above phrase.
FAQs: Hardest Language To Learn For English Speakers
What Is The Hardest Language To Learn For English Speakers?
There isn’t one hardest language to learn for English speakers. However, according to the FSI ranking, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, Arabic, and Korean are among the hardest languages for native English speakers and require about 2200 hours, or 88 weeks, to reach proficiency.
What Is The Most Difficult Part Of Learning The Hardest Language?
Language difficulty varies by language. For instance, you might struggle with Mandarin tones, Korean’s complex grammar, Arabic’s complex writing system, or Japanese’s three writing scripts. The most difficult part of a language is usually the most unfamiliar. For example, Urdu speakers will find Arabic writing easier, but it’s challenging for Arabic speakers.
Why Is Japanese Considered The Hardest Language For English Speakers?
Japanese is known as the hardest language because it follows a different SOV sentence structure than SVO, and uses three writing systems: Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji.
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Among these languages, many people find Japanese to be the hardest language to learn for English speakers, but this is not definitive. But with the right tools, even the most difficult languages can become much easier to learn. Ling offers 70+ languages, including some of the hardest ones, with fun practice exercises and plenty of speaking practice to help you start using your target language from day one.
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