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.
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.
Aramaic is best known as the language Jesus spoke. It is a Semitic language originating in the middle Euphrates. In 800-600 BC it spread from there to Syria and Mesopotamia. The oldest preserved inscriptions are from this period and written in Old Aramaic.
Official native languages
English is spoken across the UK, but it is not the only native official language. You may also hear: Welsh in Wales. Gaelic and Scots in Scotland.
Japanese is another most difficult language for all those who have grown up learning English, Spanish or French but at the same time might be easy for those who are well-versed in East Asian languages.
1. French (Français) French is the most popular foreign language in India, and the reasons to learn French are apparent. With over 30 Francophone countries around the globe, It is spoken by roughly 300 million French speakers globally.
Benefits of Learning Python
Python is one of the most chosen programming languages to learn first for its wide use and simplicity. Moreover, it is a great stepping stone to learning more complex programming languages and frameworks!
If a message circulating on social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook is to be believed, Bengali has been voted the sweetest language in the world. Conducted by Unesco, the vote ranks Spanish and Dutch as the second and third sweetest tongues respectively.
Spanish: 18 million
. Spanish is the one of the most popular languages to learn and is the most studied language in the US and UK. It's also the second most spoken language in the world.
As the third most common language used on the Internet, learning Spanish is highly accessible and one of the best for English speakers to pick up compared to the likes of Mandarin, Korean, Arabic, or Hindi. According to the British Council, 34% of UK businesses agreed that Spanish was “useful to their organisation”.
Hungarian grammar seems like the road to death for an English speaker. Because Hungarian grammar rules are the most difficult to learn, this language has 26 different cases. The suffixes dictate the tense and possession and not the word order. That's is how most of the European languages deal with this problem.
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.
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.
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.
Apart from Latin and Greek, the Welsh language has the oldest literature in Europe. The earliest Welsh poetry, around 580, by the poets Aneirin and Taliesin, describes the battles of the Welsh against the English invaders.
Old English language, also called Anglo-Saxon, language spoken and written in England before 1100; it is the ancestor of Middle English and Modern English. Scholars place Old English in the Anglo-Frisian group of West Germanic languages.
The UK has the most local accents of any English speaking country. As such, a single "British accent" does not exist. However, someone could be said to have an English, Scottish, Welsh or Irish accent, although these all have many different sub-types.