It is always a state project.. German and English belong to the same Germanic language family, so their linguistic closeness wins out. Also known as Persian, this Indo-European language is chock full of words English speakers can recognize, thanks to many English words originating from Farsi. Now, when she sees or hears Russian propaganda, Tarasiuk baulks. Right now, she teaches, writes, and creates content from the Dominican Republic. In terms of learning to read, Korean has a relatively straightforward alphabet that doesn't take too long to learn, unlike the characters used in Chinese and Japanese writing systems, so you can start sounding out words pretty quickly. What if youre starting from one of the other thousands of languages on Earth, though? Unlike most European languages, which belong to the Indo-European language family, Hungarian is a Uralic language. In addition to that, consonants and vowels have three distinct lengths: short, long, and overly long. Great job defending the Russian language and Russian speakers, Putin! Although many like Tarasiuk might shudder when they hear Russian, a sense of understanding often prevails. Additionally, some languages such as Mandarin, Thai, and Punjabi are tonal languages, where tone and pronunciation work together to communicate meaning. Beginning language learners may want to start with an easier language, such as Spanish, German or Italian. Todd Bridges and Gary Coleman played brothers. And if you're serious about learning Chinese, you'll have to tackle Chinese characters. 1. It might not be a romance language, but there are still a lot of pretty words to love. FSI language-learning categories are numbered like hurricaneshigher number, scarier language. xhr.open('POST', 'https://www.google-analytics.com/collect', true); Its the last thing an eager language learner wants to hear, but its also incredibly valuable, making it easier to stay motivated and disciplined. Albanian's 36-letter alphabet should clue you in that attempting to master this language is going to be a wild ride. It takes approximately 36 weeks (900 hours of practice) to reach professional working proficiency in these languages. There's a tongue-in-cheek book titled "Learn Greek in 25 years," but you'll be surprised at how . Human speech as a whole uses over 800 phonemes, which are the individual sounds that act as the building blocks of spoken language. However, learning them can be more difficult since there are very scarce learning resources available for Bulgarian and Macedonian online. It also has 18 cases and 14 vowels, which makes saying things right particularly difficult. On the other hand, Polish doesnt distinguish as many tenses as English does - theres only past, present, and future combined with a perfective and imperfective verb aspect. So, how long does it take to master it? - instead, Russians affix endings and use inflection to indicate the same kinds of tenses and action. Arabic. Prepositions behave similarly to English, and questions have many question words that are simple enough to remember. The sentence structure is also very different from English. It uses VSO (verb, subject, object) word order, which can be tricky for most. Meanwhile, the written version of Hindi, which is written in Devanagari script, lacks certain phonetic markings that would help learners better comprehend how to pronounce words. Finnish. For English terms you need to finally perfect, here are 23 Words You Need to Stop Mispronouncing. There are a lot of sounds that simply aren't present in the English language and require a lot of practice to master. 3. They think faster in Russian language, she said. She is a polyglot and a digital nomad. The Korean language doesnt have an equivalent phoneme. To begin with, the Slavic languages derive from the Proto-Slavic language - their immediate parent language. There's a reason "it's Greek to me" is a common idiom for expressing confusion, after all. Being able to judge how hard a language will be to learn aids you in a few ways. . But the more each language continued to evolve, the more it differed from its initial state. Arabic is a language most Mandarin speakers will find challenging. Also, some of its letters are tricky to pronounce, and Korean has its own version of honorific speech that requires specific forms of words depending on social context. Nouns have 15 different cases, while in English, they have only three: subjective, objective, possessive. It made people rethink what language they wanted to speak and I started hearing Ukrainian literally everywhere, said Tarasiuk, a front-end designer who had to put her career on hold because of the persistent blackouts caused by Russian attacks. But, said Arel, the legislation affected education as it essentially eliminates Russian from high schools. Some friends in Central Asia are also trying to avoid it. With over 70 years of experience teaching languages to US government employees, theyve compiled a comprehensive and widely accepted list of language rankings. Pronouncing Czech words is a nightmare for English speakers. Mandarin is one of the few languages ranked as the most difficult to learn for English speakers by the Foreign Service Institute. After 2022, the number of those who identify as Russian-speaking has probably decreased. The alphabet has a staggering 44 consonants and 32 vowels. The most often sounds like the E in women, and to the O in rope. The has no exact equivalent in most English accents. Albanian nouns have both a case and a number, requiring the learner to memorize each noun. In terms of grammar, Russian is more complex than English. In Gaelic, though, verbs go at the beginning of a sentence, so Gaelic sentences are structured verb-subject-object (Threw I the ball). Knowing how to read it doesn't even particularly help learn how to write it. Hungarian is a member of the same small language family as Finnish, so the average English speaker won't be finding much familiarity in its vocabulary. There are three different genders for nouns and various grammar rules unfamiliar to English speakers. But to translate that same statement into Mandarin, youll need a measure word. Strengthening your reading and writing skills in that language, then, takes far less time. However, its universally acknowledged that Slavic languages dont belong to the easiest languages to learn, especially for English speakers. These are the HARDEST LANGUAGES to learn ranked by the time it takes to be FLUENT in them! The default vowel sound of those letters is changed by using a secondary symbol. You need about 3,000 to . Arabic speakers find Russian grammar complicated because it has a large number of unfamiliar rules and a ton of exceptions to those rules. } Russian speakers could also request Russian versions of other documents, such as marriage certificates. There are a number of ways that a language can differ from your own. A 2010 study that looked at immigrants to the Netherlands who were learning Dutch found that people who spoke languages with a lot of Dutch cognates such as Swedish, German, and Danish did better on a Dutch language exam compared to people who spoke languages with few Dutch cognates, such as French and Greek. Japanese requires a large amount of study to learn because its writing system includes three different scripts, and the language includes different vocabulary and grammatical forms to use based on social context. Very different! Terms & Conditions | Pronunciation makes Danish one of the most difficult languages to learn. Oleksandr Zahalskyy spent most of his life speaking only Russian. Expect to spend around 1,100 hours in class to attain speaking and reading proficiency, according to the FSI. Conversely, languages that are completely unrelated to your language will be more challenging and take longer to master. Vietnamese is also difficult for Hindi speakers due to its sentence structure and tones, though its writing system is easier to learn than that of either Japanese or Mandarin because it uses a phonetic alphabet instead of characters. Russian is the most widely spoken Slavic language, with 155 million native Russian speakers. To understand it, you must recognize the pitch of a tone in relation to the context of the world and overall sentence. The West Slavic languages include Polish, Czech, and Slovak. Privacy Policy | The letter b sounds like v, and the letter h sounds like n.. In 1989, for example, while about 40 percent of the Donbas population identified as ethnically Russian, more than 60 percent considered Russian as their mother tongue. Russian is the most spoken native language in Europe and the 8th most-spoken language in the world. A major reason why is that Finnish has so many different noun cases and verb conjugations that can shape words depending on their context. Country with the greatest number of speakers: Egypt. The language is also known for having very confusing conjugations. Greek in particular is a highly inflected language, which means its words often change based on grammatical categories such as tense, number, and gender. Belonging to the Finno-Ugric family, Estonian is a unique language that can be a challenge to learn. Mandarin Chinese. Then you better be ready to study. The first obstacle to learning Japanese is the writing system, which will provide you no clues unless you also speak Chinese. What's New at RussianLessons.Net. Get the most out of this nighttime activity. Dont let their place on this list deter you from diving right in, thoughweve built courses to help you learn quickly and effectively! The pronunciation is also pretty challenging for native English speakers. According to the Foreign Service Institute (FSI), Spanish belongs to category I by difficulty. Russian, Ukrainian, and Belorussian belong to this group. In contrast to the similarities between the Romance languages listed above, German and Mandarintwo languages of different families with entirely unique writing systemscouldnt be more linguistically distant. One example is Thai. Tarasuik disagrees, but says Russia has unintentionally reversed decades of Russification. Russian. If you think picking up a little French or Spanish in your spare time is difficult, then you should know the kind of work you're getting into learning some other languages from around the world. Grammatically, verbs often come before the subject, while there are many dual forms of words in addition to the singular and plural forms. It has Dutch at its core but it is also intertwined with other dialects and indigenous languages from Africa. Try it today at www.rosettastone.com. Where its most commonly spoken: Greece, Cyprus. Why it's hard: Despite 221 million native speakers that you can potentially learn from, Arabic is still one of the hardest languages to learn. Benefits of Chatting with Native Spanish Speakers. These languages, which include Vietnamese and Mandarin, require correct pronunciation and inflection to create meaning for each word. All Rights Reserved. When we talk about linguistic distance, were referring to the fundamental differences between languages and how or where theyve evolved from. So, what are the origins of the Slavic languages, and what are they? Polish is another language that can give English speakers a hard time, with spelling and grammar causing the biggest problems for learners. For more on the Czech language, see this comparison of Czech with Russian and German. In this post, well take a look at the easiest and hardest languages to learn, the factors that determine language difficulty, and a complete ranking of the worlds most widely spoken languagesincluding how long it takes to learn each language. February 8, 2022. Language difficulty rankings exist so you can set the fluency goal posts at a realistic distance. It's helpful if you speak another Slavic language, but otherwise, it's going to be a challenge.