Arabic is the queen of poetic languages, the 6th official language of the UN and second on our list of toughest languages to learn.
Across multiple sources, Mandarin Chinese is the number one language listed as the most challenging to learn. The Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center puts Mandarin in Category IV, which is the list of the most difficult languages to learn for English speakers.
Kawishana is the rarest language in the world.
The language features grammatical rules that are often broken, an alphabet that can confuse people who are used to a character-based system, and spelling and pronunciation irregularities that perplex even native speakers.
Local Names for Mandarin
Mandarin is the term used through much of the Western world, but the Chinese themselves refer to the language as 普通话 (pǔ tōng huà), 国语 (guó yǔ), or 華语 (huá yǔ). 普通话 (pǔ tōng huà) literally means “common language” and is the term used in mainland China.
Of these, Spanish and Italian are the easiest for native English speakers to learn, followed by Portuguese and finally French.
Sumerian can be considered the first language in the world, according to Mondly. The oldest proof of written Sumerian was found on the Kish tablet in today's Iraq, dating back to approximately 3500 BC.
Widely regarded as one of the world's toughest languages to learn, Mandarin is considered by many as impossible. Anyone who's learnt this notoriously difficult language is bound to be met with gasps of surprise and admiration when speaking of their accomplishment.
1. English (1,452 million speakers) According to Ethnologue, English is the most-spoken language in the world including native and non-native speakers. Like Latin or Greek at the time, English has become the world's common language.
1. Norwegian. This may come as a surprise, but we have ranked Norwegian as the easiest language to learn for English speakers. Norwegian is a member of the Germanic family of languages — just like English!
Leonese is one of the most obscure languages in the entire world- only being spoken by between 20,000 and 50,000 people, and only known by a handful more people! Like most other languages in Spain, Leonese too, is a romance language.
The closest language to English is one called Frisian, which is a Germanic language spoken by a small population of about 480,000 people. There are three separate dialects of the language, and it's only spoken at the southern fringes of the North Sea in the Netherlands and Germany.
Except for Frisian, Dutch is linguistically the closest language to English, with both languages being part of the West Germanic linguistic family. This means many Dutch words are cognates with English (meaning they share the same linguistic roots), giving them similar spelling and pronunciation.
The Japanese language is considered one of the most difficult to learn by many English speakers. With three separate writing systems, an opposite sentence structure to English, and a complicated hierarchy of politeness, it's decidedly complex.
The English language is widely regarded as one of the most difficult to master. Because of its unpredictable spelling and challenging to learn grammar, it is challenging for both learners and native speakers.
Lojban (pronounced [ˈloʒban] ( listen)) is a logical, constructed, human language created by the Logical Language Group which aims to be syntactically unambiguous. It succeeds the Loglan project.