Learning a new language might be challenging, but if the one you’ve selected is already regarded as complex and difficult, you’re in for a real mental challenge! Mandarin is one of the most complicated languages in the world. For language enthusiasts and polyglots who are always rushing to choose a new intriguing language, we have compiled a list of the ten hardest languages in this blog!

• Mandarin: As previously stated, Mandarin is universally regarded as the most challenging language to learn! The language, spoken by more than a billion people worldwide, can be callous for speakers of languages that employ the Latin writing system. Mandarin is a tonal language because it includes four tones, each of which has a distinct meaning. As a result, one word can be pronounced in four different ways. One must be familiar with this culture to learn this language. The ability to speak Chinese does not automatically translate to the ability to read. From a commercial standpoint, learning this language is quite beneficial. 

• Arabic: The sixth official language of the UN and the second most difficult language to master is Arabic. With more than 300 million speakers, it is standard in the Middle East and Africa. The Foreign Services Institute estimates that learning Arabic can take up to two years. Due to its many dialects, extensive vocabulary (over 200 synonyms for the word “camel” alone! ), writing from right to left, difficult pronunciations, and lack of vowels, it is challenging to learn. The Arabic language is highly unique since it has some symbols named zair, Zabar, and paish that are used to move letters up and down. The meaning of a word completely changes if we move symbols around. This makes it one of the most challenging languages to learn.

• Japanese: Japanese is a native tongue of the Japanese people, who take great pleasure in their language and take significant measures to promote it! Due to its sentence structure, countless dialects, and thousands of kanji characters, Japanese is a complex language to learn. Those who have spent their entire lives learning languages like English, Spanish, or French will find Japanese to be one of the most challenging, but those fluent in East Asian languages may find it simple. Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji are the three separate writing systems used in Japanese.
• Hiragana: The alphabet used in Japan is known as hiragana; it is used for words in the native Japanese language and has 46 characters or 51 phonetic features. Most kanji only have one pronunciation, which is essential for comprehending how Japanese words sound.
• Katakana: Loanwords, or words borrowed from another language, such as technical and scientific terms, as well as some plant and animal names, are written in katakana.
• Kanji: Kanji is a collection of many Japanese symbols that can be translated into English to represent whole words, concepts, or sentences.
• Hungarian: Hungarian has plenty of exciting complexities. First, it is agglutinative, meaning that words have prefixes and suffixes attached to them rather than independent prepositions. This implies that a lengthy verb can convey the majority of a statement. Additionally, there are 26 cases in the language, which makes grammar a little tricky. It is also a vowel-harmony language, which means that a final vowel is occasionally added to a word to make it sound more harmonious. 

• Russian: One of the most well-known European languages, Russian is spoken by more than 150 million people worldwide. Due to the complex case and gender system, varied grammatical rules, and novel writing style, learning Russian is quite an experience. When learning this language, it is simple to make spelling and pronunciation mistakes. Russian is regarded as one of the most challenging languages. The Cyrillic alphabet used in Russian has both familiar and foreign letters. Russian employs many consonants that are close together, making it one of the hardest languages to learn in terms of writing and pronunciation. Regardless of how challenging it is, learning Russian might be worthwhile. It has a lot of cultural and ethical relevance.

• Korean: Unlike the symbols used in the Chinese and Japanese writing systems, the alphabet for the Korean language is quite simple and doesn’t take very long to master. As a result, you can start sounding out words very fast. Korean is the most peculiar and unique language because it has no connections to any other language. However, this language also has several difficulties, including a unique alphabet and challenging grammar.

• Finnish: There are 6 million native Finnish speakers worldwide, and there are such wide regional varieties of the language that colloquial Finnish can diverge significantly from the standard. With 15 different cases for nouns, Finnish has earned the reputation of being a complex language to master.

• Polish: The sixth most widespread tongue in the EU and a minority tongue in nations like the Czech Republic, Hungary, Ukraine, and Lithuania. Polish words have many consonants, making them challenging to spell and speak.

• Vietnamese: Vietnamese has more vowels than English and a variety of dialects. Another significant challenge for non-native speakers is tonal and written character discrepancies. Vietnamese, for instance, assigns a tonal symbol to each letter, with even the most essential characters having more than ten variations.

• Icelandic: Since Iceland was established in the ninth century, fewer than 400,000 people live on one island and speak Icelandic, which has remained substantially unchanged. Indeed, even now, practically any modern speaker can understand Icelandic sagas delivered in the mediaeval era. Iceland invents new words, or neologisms, to give outdated words modern meaning rather than borrowing foreign words for new notions. Another feature that is challenging to understand is Icelandic grammar.
  
  

Final words

These ten languages are among the hardest to learn, and learning a new language is a difficult task that tests one’s mental capacity. Fortunately, you don’t need to know any further languages to communicate with your audience. The speed, quality, and scalability you require to translate your business are provided by our hybrid approach to AI-powered machine translation in combination with White Globe’s network of 75000+ active translators covering 350+ languages.