The most difficult language- a rather contradictory concept due to the fact that it is necessary to start from your native one. Naturally, it will be much easier for Russian-speaking people to master Ukrainian or Belarusian than for the British. However, not a single linguist in the world can say which languages are more difficult to master and which are easier. However, there are many factors on the basis of which we can create and offer you a rating. In particular:
There is no point in distributing the Top 10 by numbers, for good reasons. Each of the languages presented is difficult due to the majority opinion. So…
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Chinese is one of the most complex languages on the planet because it includes a lot of ancient hieroglyphs. Each character must be drawn carefully, taking into account even small deviations in the slopes of different lines. The absence of any squiggle radically changes the meaning of the content in the letter. At the same time, looking at Chinese characters It is impossible to immediately guess what it is about, naturally, for people who are not familiar with the peculiarities of the language. Speaking about spoken language, it is important to note that within the framework of communication it is necessary to observe the rules of tone and homophones. Otherwise, they won’t understand, even if you know the meaning of the word and can form sentences correctly. Pronunciation plays an important role.
First of all, the difficulties of learning the Russian language are due to the fact that stress can fall on different syllables. U unprepared people on correct pronunciation years go by. At the same time, due to an incorrectly placed syllable, the meaning of what was said can radically change. This, in turn, is due to the presence of words of the same type, of which there are many in Russian. Speaking about grammar, it is important to study not only complex cases, but also numbers, tenses, and declensions. Commas and other punctuation marks deserve special attention, with the placement of which most even Russian-speaking and literate people have problems.
In number complex languages world, Japanese should be added, which includes 35 cases. If you have had experience communicating with Hungarians, you have probably noticed that it is imbued with various expressive phraseological units and suffixes. It is quite difficult to perceive the flow of thoughts, if the representative of Hungary is a talkative person, it is almost impossible.
Speaking about the pronunciation of Hungarian words, difficulties arise due to the huge number of consonants. Therefore, even after studying all 35 cases, it will not be possible to speak fluently because of pronunciation!
It is unlikely that Japanese is somehow inferior in complexity to the Chinese language. In this case, it is also necessary to study a huge number of diverse hieroglyphs. Moreover, there are three different types, or rather writing systems. For studying Japanese for higher education students educational institutions is given several times more time than in general education institutions in other states. Actually, there is nothing surprising about this, because it includes about 15,000 different hieroglyphs. To pass the final exam, you need to know 1,500 different characters.
Probably, many residents of the CIS will disagree, but Polish is one of the most difficult languages in the world, which is due to the absence of certain rules, but the presence of many exceptions. It's quite difficult to remember everything. Despite the fact that there are not so many letters in the alphabet - 32, problems still arise even with reading one word, of course, if it traditionally contains incomprehensible sounds. There are also few cases - only 7, but they need to be understood. Spoken speech Poles should be included in a separate niche for the most stubborn people, because the pronunciation of many words is quite difficult.
For many, Basque is an unknown term, for others one of the most difficult languages in the world, for others the personification of history and culture. Let's try to figure out the true purpose and origin.
Currently, many Spaniards and some French speak using Basque. At the same time, the language is in no way connected with any of the ones we are familiar with, and includes 24 cases. The uniqueness lies in the fact that all words are connected through the endings of the same twenty-four cases. It is believed that it was created by the Amazons.
Another complex and not common language that is used for communication in some states of America, including Arizona. Based on history, the creators of this species are the Indians, namely 200,000 people. The originality and complexity lie in the unusual pronunciation of consonants. Surprisingly, many Europeans simply cannot physiologically pronounce certain words in Navajo. However, Asians manage to easily master this language, however, this is not necessary, because not many Americans speak it.
Icelandic is quite interesting and at the same time intricate, including words that have long been forgotten. Many experts attribute distant roots to the origin of this language. Really ancient language, which explains the origins of many terms. Today, books and reference books are used to study Icelandic, but this is not enough. It is necessary to have experience in communicating with the indigenous people, otherwise you will have problems pronouncing many words. However, grammar cannot be properly understood through books.
Linguists from the University of Oslo have named the most difficult language to master in the world, which has the most complex phonetics. According to scientists, this is the dialect of the Pirahã people living in the Amazon jungle of Brazil. The researchers explained that the reason for the complexity of the Pirahãs is due to the many whistling sounds.
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As Izvestia writes, representatives of this tribe whistle words and entire sentences to each other. In this case, sounds travel over a long distance. With the help of the language, the Pirahans navigate in space, making their way through the jungle or crossing a river. It is also used for hunting.
It is interesting that the verbs here are used only in the future and past tense. Also, the language does not have singular or singular nouns. plural. Speech, based on one consonant and one vowel, can sound in different keys.
Let us note, according to neurophysiologists, that even the wearer’s brain has difficulty perceiving them. For example, Chinese and Arabic.
In response to the favorite question of everyone who has encountered learning a foreign language - what is the most difficult language on Earth? - linguists chuckle: it is impossible to give a definite answer. In their opinion, the difficulties depend primarily on the student himself, namely on what dialect is native to him. The rather difficult Russian language will not be so difficult for a Czech or Ukrainian, but a Turk or Japanese may not be able to handle it.
From the point of view of “relatedness”, the Basque language (Euskara) is called one of the most difficult to learn - it is not related to any of the currently known groups of languages, living or dead. Everyone is equal in the face of the difficulties of mastering Euskara. The Guinness Book of Records calls the most difficult languages Chippewa (the dialect of the Ojibwe Indian people in Canada and the USA), Haida (the language of the Haida Indian people living in the northwest North America), Tabasaran (spoken by one of the indigenous peoples of Dagestan), Eskimo and Chinese.
The most difficult in terms of writing are Chinese, Japanese and Korean languages. They are difficult even for the native speakers themselves. For example, in Japan, school education lasts as long as 12 years, and half of this time is devoted to just two subjects - the native language and mathematics. More from preschool age Developmental activities are conducted with Japanese children to train their memory. To pass the final exams, they need to learn about 1850 hieroglyphs, and to understand a note printed in a newspaper - about 3 thousand.
In the group of the lightest (again, for carriers in English) included Danish, Dutch, French, Haitian, Creole, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Swahili and Swedish. The second most difficult languages were Bulgarian, Dari, Farsi (Persian), German, Modern Greek, Hindi-Urdu, Indonesian and Malay.
Amharic, Bengali, and Burmese are considered even more challenging by American teachers and students, as are Czech, Finnish, Modern Hebrew, Hungarian, Lao, Nepali, Polish, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Sinhala, Thai, Tamil, Turkish, and Vietnamese. The most difficult languages for English-speaking students were Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and Korean.
It is curious that despite the kinship and obvious similarities in spelling, Hebrew and Arabic belonging to the Semitic group turned out to be at different levels of complexity. This pattern is also true for speakers of both languages. As a study by scientists from the University of Haifa showed, texts in Arabic native language more difficult to read than for Jews and English (or Americans). The reason is simple but surprising: the brain processes the graphic characters of these languages differently.
As you know, the functions of the left and right hemispheres are different. The right one, for example, “specializes” in solving spatial problems and patterned information processing, while the left one is responsible for speech recognition and detailed processing text messages. In this case, the right hemisphere is responsible for intuition and is able to “understand” metaphors, that is, words and phrases with a veiled meaning, while the left hemisphere is responsible for understanding only the literal meaning.
Israeli scientists analyzed brain activity during reading and word recognition in people whose native language was English, Arabic or Hebrew. Volunteers were offered two experiments. In the first, they were shown words or meaningless combinations of letters in their native language on a screen. The subject had to determine whether a given word made sense, and the researchers recorded the speed and accuracy of the answer.
In the second test, volunteers were shown words simultaneously on the left and right sides of the screen—either on one or both. Thus, the brain was faced with the task of processing the shown symbols with the left or right hemisphere separately.
The resulting picture turned out to be interesting. English-speaking volunteers and those whose native language was Hebrew easily “read” words in one hemisphere independently of the other. But the Arabs had it worse: when reading in Arabic the right hemisphere cannot function without using the resources of the left. Reading Arabic characters uniquely activates the cognitive systems of the brain, scientists conclude. If you want to develop your mind, learn Arabic!
By the way, the same pattern was previously discovered for the Chinese language compared to English. In the study, scientists observed the brain activity of Chinese and English speakers, respectively, while they listened to their native speech. In English-speaking subjects, only the left hemisphere was activated, while in Chinese, both were activated.
There are currently about 6,000 different languages in the world. Some of them are simple, some are complex. And there are those that for foreigners are more like a cryptographic code than a language of communication. Here are the 10 most difficult languages to learn.
10. Tuyuka
“Think before you speak,” we were often told as children. But in the Tuyuca language, spoken by the Indians living in the Amazon, they always think about what they are talking about. After all, in the Tuyuka language there are special verb endings that allow the listener to understand how the speaker knows what he is talking about. And there is no way to do without them: the language demands it! So when you say something like “a woman is washing clothes,” you must add, “I know because I saw it myself.” In addition, this language has from 50 to 140 classes of nouns. The Tuyuk language is agglutinative, which means that one word can mean an entire phrase. And two whole words meaning the pronoun “we” - inclusive and exclusive.
9. Abkhazian
The Abkhaz language has only three vowel sounds - a, ы and aa. The remaining vowels, denoted in writing by separate letters - e, o, i, y, are obtained from a combination of other vowels and consonants. The Abkhaz language compensates for its vocal poverty with an abundance of consonants: in literary language there are 58 of them, and in the Bzyb dialect there are as many as 67. By the way, the Abkhaz alphabet based on the Cyrillic alphabet was created in 1862, and three years later the Abkhaz primer was released. The manner of Abkhazians starting a word with the letter “a” has been joked about many times. But this prefix, or in common parlance a prefix, performs the same function in the Abkhaz language that the in English is definite article. It is placed before all nouns, and according to the rules of the Abkhaz language, it is added to borrowed words too. So “the death of the air squadron” is not a joke.
8. Khoisan
Some Khoisan languages are endangered, and many have already become extinct. But still, approximately 370 thousand people speak these very unusual dialects. The fact is that in the languages spoken in southern Africa around the Kalahari Desert, there are so-called clicks or clicking consonants. The term “Khoisan” itself was constructed from words in the Khoisan Nama language: “Khoi” in it means man, and “San” means “Bushman”. Initially, this term was used to designate the physical-racial type of these peoples, and only much later, the American linguist Joseph Greenberg applied the term to the macrofamily of languages that use clicking sounds. Recently, genetic scientists confirmed the ancient isolation of the Khoisan people from the rest of humanity and discovered that the tribes living north and south of the Kalahari have been isolated from each other for at least 30 thousand years.
7. Finnish
Anyone who has tried to learn all fifteen Finnish cases and more than a hundred conjugations and personal forms of the verb will agree that the Finnish language is difficult. Finns don't just burn their hearts with verbs - they inflect the verb like a noun! Add to this the alternation of consonants, an abundance of suffixes and mysterious postpositions, and verb control that is difficult for a foreigner - and it seems like it’s time to fall into despair. But don’t rush: the Finnish language has a lot of comfort for a diligent student. Words are heard, written and read exactly the same - there are no unpronounceable letters here. The stress always falls on the first syllable, and the category of gender is completely absent, which is quite capable of warming the soul of a supporter of equality. Finnish has several past tenses, but no future tense. Experts on national character claim that this is because Finns are accustomed to answering for the words spoken, and if a Finn has promised, he will definitely do it.
6. Chinese
Newest dictionary Chinese language "Zhonghua Zihai", compiled in 1994, contains - are you sitting? - 85,568 hieroglyphs. It would be more correct, however, to speak not about the Chinese language, but about the Chinese branch of languages, which unites many dialects, but there are still no easy ones among them. Take the hieroglyphs: as a consolation, we can immediately say that not all of the 85-odd thousand are actively used in modern language: the lion's share of them is found only in the commemorative literature of various Chinese dynasties and is no longer used in practice. For example, the hieroglyph "se", meaning "chatty", which consists of 64 strokes. However, today’s hieroglyphs are not so simple: for example, the hieroglyph “nan”, which means “stuffy nose”, is represented by 36 lines. Unlike happy Europeans who learn a few dozen letters, a resident of the Celestial Empire, in order to even begin to read, must memorize, at worst, at least 1,500 hieroglyphs. But you also have to learn how to draw each hieroglyph. Oh, you are heavy, Chinese letter!
5. Chippewa
The champion in verb forms is, of course, the language of the American Indians Chippewa, or, as they are more often called, Ojibwe. Linguists call the Chippewa language the southwestern dialect of the Ojibway language itself. So, in this language there are as many as 6 thousand verb forms! But even with all the complexity of this language, you, of course, know a couple of words from it: these are, for example, the words “wigwam” or “totem”. Henry Longfellow's epic poem is based on the legends of the Ojibwe people. The American classic used myths, place names and even words from the Ojibwe language, but like any outsider he was not able to take everything into account. So the mistake is right on the cover: the legendary Ojibwe hero is called Nanobozho, because Hiawatha is a character from Iroquois mythology.
4. Eskimo
Are you familiar with the word “igloo”, which means the Eskimos’ winter home, built from blocks of snow or ice? Then congratulations: you know a word from the Eskimo language. It also rightfully takes its place of honor among the most difficult languages in the world: the Guinness Book of Records claims that it has 63 present tense forms, and simple nouns in it have 252 inflections. The term “inflection” in linguistics refers to different types changes to words or roots. Let’s just correct the Guinness Book: modern linguists do not distinguish the Eskimo language. Apparently, we are talking about the entire Eskimo branch of the Eskimo-Aleut languages. But the world record registrar is not mistaken about the main thing: all Eskimo languages are extremely complex: for example, up to 12 grammatical categories can be expressed in one verbal form using suffixes. Speakers of this language think figuratively: the word “Internet” in it is expressed by the term “ikiaqqivik”, which means “journey through layers.”
3. Tabasaran
The number of languages spoken by the indigenous peoples of Dagestan cannot be accurately counted. We can only say that 14 of them have writing. The most complex of them and, according to the Guinness Book of Records, one of the most complex in the world is Tabasaran. The language of the Lezgin branch of the Nakh-Dagestan family of languages holds the world record for the number of cases - they are distinguished from 44 to 52 in the Tabasaran language! It has 54 letters and 10 parts of speech, and there are no prepositions, but postpositions are used instead. So that life does not seem like honey to a student of the Tabasaran language, there are as many as three dialects in the language. But the Tabasaran dictionary contains a lot of borrowings. The mountain residents borrowed ancient household, military and craft terminology from the Farsi language. The Tabasarans borrowed religious and scientific terms from Arabic. And the Russian language shared modern socio-political, scientific and technical vocabulary with Tabasaran. Just don't forget. that all these words change in more than 50 cases!
2. Navajo
The idea of using complex languages to transmit encrypted messages came to the Americans back in the First World War. world war: At that time, Choctaw Indians served in the US Army. During World War II they took advantage of this experience. And in addition to the complex Basque language, they began to transmit messages in the Navajo language. Fortunately, there were enough native speakers of this complex language, who also spoke English, but there was no written language in the language, and therefore no dictionaries at all. “Windtalkers,” that is, “speakers with the wind,” as the Navajo code talkers called themselves, were even forced to invent new words that were previously absent in their language. For example, the plane was called “ne-akhs-ya”, that is, “owl”, Submarine- “besh-lo”, literally - “iron fish”. And the Navajo signalmen called Hitler “posa-tai-wo,” that is, “crazy a white man" In addition to vowels and consonants, this language has four more tones - high, low, rising and falling. Particularly complex in the Navajo language are verb forms, which consist of a stem to which derivational and inflectional prefixes are added. The fascist himself will break his head!
1. Basque
In this unique, unlike any other European language, very ancient concepts have been preserved. For example, the word “knife” literally means “a stone that cuts,” and “ceiling” means “the roof of a cave.” We are talking about a language that its speakers call Euskara, and we call the Basque language. It is a so-called isolated language: it does not belong to any known language family. Now it is spoken and written by approximately 700 thousand people, living mostly on a 50-kilometer-wide coastal strip from the Spanish city of Bilbao to the city of Bayonne in France. The Basque language is classified as an agglutinative language - this is what linguists call languages in which suffixes and prefixes are used to form new words, each of them carrying only one meaning. There are about half a million words in the Basque language dictionary - approximately the same as in our great and mighty one. This is explained big amount synonyms and dialect variants. The obscurity and complexity of the Basque language played a positive role: during the Second World War, it was used by radio operators in the US Army.
Have you just started studying foreign language and have already encountered incredible difficulties?
Can't wade through the thorns of German, English or French grammar, phonetics and vocabulary without tears? Chin up! Be glad that you are not faced with the task of conquering one of the most difficult languages in the world.
Foreigners compare the study of the “great and mighty” to a nightmare. Even the Russian alphabet puts people in a state of panic. Many letters in Cyrillic look the same as in Latin, but sound completely different. The purpose of “b” and “b” is a sealed secret. But most often the stumbling block is “Y” and “Y”. Pronouncing these sounds is real torture for the uninitiated.
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Words also raise questions. The most difficult ones to learn are homonyms. Although they are written the same, they have different meanings. Synonyms also do not stand aside - the verb “to go” alone has about 50 identical concepts! And the consonance of some words and changes in stress can distort the meaning of the phrase and cause an awkward situation.
Having mastered the kaleidoscope of letters and words, the unfortunate ones find themselves in the wonderful world of 6 cases, 2 conjugations and 3 declensions. Keeping all the rules in your head is already a feat, but mastering the exceptions deserves a medal.
The grammar of the Hungarian language is almost inaccessible to mere mortals. It is fraught with unpleasant surprises:
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The Magyar alphabet consists of 40 letters (14 vowels and 26 consonants). A difficult point for Russians is the peculiarity of the pronunciation of symbols. So, “S” is read as “Ш”, “GY” - as “Дь”, “A” - as something between the Russian “О” and “А”.
Linguistics is also insidious. It’s hard not to faint when you see the word “megszentsеgtelenнthetetlensеgeskedеseitekеrt” in the text, which translates roughly as “in connection with your desire to maintain an impeccable reputation.”
The samurai language is a severe test for foreigners. Even the Japanese find it difficult to learn the rules of their native speech: 10 out of 12 school years children spend struggling with intricate kanji (hieroglyphs) and two alphabets that have their own alphabet. What can we say about those who grew up far from mysterious calligraphic signs!
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The good news is that Japanese morphology is simple and has a clear structure. Nouns and adjectives do not change, and verb forms are easy to learn. The bad news is the abundance of grammatical synonyms: methods of expressing time, condition and reason that are indistinguishable to the European ear.
