{"id":24556,"date":"2022-09-06T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-09-06T07:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.act-translations.com\/80000-characters-and-40-cases-the-five-hardest-languages-in-the-world\/"},"modified":"2024-08-08T15:35:11","modified_gmt":"2024-08-08T13:35:11","slug":"80000-characters-and-40-cases-the-five-hardest-languages-in-the-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.act-translations.com\/en-gb\/80000-characters-and-40-cases-the-five-hardest-languages-in-the-world\/","title":{"rendered":"80,000 characters and 40 cases: the five hardest languages in the world"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Language is such an important part of people\u2019s identity and culture that the European Union has defined linguistic diversity as one of its fundamental values. According to the EU Commission, all Europeans should be able to speak two foreign languages by 2025. The average European speaks just 2.32 languages<\/a> today\u2014including their native language.<\/p>\n\n

But what makes learning another language so hard? And which of the world\u2019s languages are the hardest to learn? Arabic? Chinese? Or maybe German? All three, according to a UNESCO ranking. There are plenty of lists of the world\u2019s hardest languages. In a LinkedIn survey, our followers voted for Chinese.<\/p>\n\n

This blog post looks at the top five hardest languages to learn for people who are native speakers of German.<\/p>\n\n

First of all, What makes a language hard to learn?<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n

There are nearly 6,900 languages in the world. Why do we find some of them easier to learn than others? All kinds of factors determine success in language learning:<\/p>\n\n

How different is the foreign language from your native language?<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n

If the root language is different from your first language, the foreign language may be harder to learn. For speakers of Romance languages, for example, learning Arabic is a much more complex task than learning French.<\/p>\n\n

Does the foreign language use a different alphabet?<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n

There are around 100 alphabets around the world. If you are accustomed to the Latin alphabet, you may find it challenging to learn hieroglyphs or Chinese characters.<\/p>\n\n

How different are the sounds from your native language?<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n

If the language you are trying to learn contains sounds that your native language doesn\u2019t, it may take you longer to master the pronunciation. But the main question is: how important is pronunciation? If you don\u2019t get the tones right in Chinese, for example, you run the risk of committing a major faux pas. But more on that later.<\/p>\n\n

Does the language have complicated grammar?<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n

More than 40 cases? Words all fused together? Five genders? Many language learners find grammar a curse. There are dramatic differences in the complexity of the grammar in different languages.<\/p>\n\n

The five hardest languages in the world<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n

According to these metrics, what languages are the hardest for native speakers of German to learn? Here are our top five\u2014in no particular order. After all, the difficulty of learning a language ultimately depends on the learner, so it\u2019s always subjective.<\/p>\n\n

Chinese<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n

It\u2019s all Chinese to me! Anyone who tries to read Chinese characters for the first time is sure to think exactly that. In stark contrast to, say, the Latin alphabet, Mandarin<\/a> has more than 80,000 characters. You have to have mastered at least 2,000 of them for basic expression. Each character stands for a word. And they combine to form new words depending on the order in which they are arranged.<\/p>\n\n

The vital importance of getting the tone right in Chinese is a struggle for speakers of languages like German, where the tone doesn\u2019t matter all that much. In Chinese, the meaning of any one syllable can be vastly different depending on the tone in which it is spoken. Pronunciation alone determines whether \u201cma\u201d means \u201chorse,\u201d \u201cscold,\u201d \u201chemp\u201d or \u201cmother,\u201d as you can see in this video of Chinese tongue-twisters<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n

They say that it takes native German speakers around 88 weeks<\/a> to gain a basic command of Mandarin.<\/p>\n\n

Japanese<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n

Let\u2019s start with the good news: Unlike Chinese, Japanese<\/a> is not a tonal language, which reduces the chance of major mispronunciation-related gaffes. It\u2019s the writing part that\u2019s tricky, as Japanese uses three writing systems: hiragana, katakana and kanji. The first is based on a syllable alphabet with 45 syllables, while kanji uses Chinese characters so it\u2019s similarly complex. Since Japanese newspapers use kanji, people need to know around 2,000 characters in order to follow current events.<\/p>\n\n

If you suffer from grammarphobia, Japanese may not be your cup of tea. As an agglutinative (meaning \u201cgluing together\u201d) language, Japanese forms words by joining morphemes to the root word. The question word \u201cka\u201d is added at the end of a sentence, so you don\u2019t know whether you\u2019ve been listening to a statement or a query until the end.<\/p>\n\n

Japan is known for politeness and pride. Depending on what group you are speaking to\u2014\u201cuchi,\u201d i.e. family or colleagues, or \u201csoto,\u201d who are people you don\u2019t know\u2014you have to use different forms of address and politeness. For fans of linguistic challenges, Japanese is certainly a rich source of excitement.<\/p>\n\n

Arabic<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n

Arabic may have just 28 letters, but each one can be written any of four different ways depending on its position in a word. The fact that many vowels are not written, only spoken, also makes things really tough for learners.<\/p>\n\n

Speaking of speaking: Arabic uses diacritical marks in the form of dots, hooks, lines, and circles that can change the pronunciation and meaning of a word completely. For example, the word \u0639\u0642\u062f can mean contract, necklace, or necktie depending on the diacritics. The guttural sounds make learning to speak Arabic even harder.<\/p>\n\n

Another huge hurdle for westerners is getting used to writing from right to left. Incidentally, there\u2019s no such thing as \u201cthe Arabic language.\u201d The are huge differences among the various Arabic<\/a> dialects, including the vocabulary and grammar. If you can talk to an Egyptian, don\u2019t assume you can also chat with someone from Yemen.<\/p>\n\n

Hungarian <\/strong><\/h5>\n\n

Hungarian<\/a> belongs to the Finno-Ugric family. It stands linguistically alone with Finnish among many Indo-European neighbors. With an unbeatable 44 letters, up to 40 cases and really challenging grammar, Hungarian was a shoo-in for our top five.<\/p>\n\n

Where languages like English and German use auxiliary verbs, Hungarian uses a special case. The fact that Hungarian, like Japanese, is also agglutinative only adds to the case complexities: place indications, prepositions and possessive pronouns are simply tacked on to each word. When you\u2019re at home, for example, you\u2019re not \u201cin your house\u201d but \u201chouseinyour.\u201d<\/p>\n\n

This results in plenty of unpronounceable marvels like \u201cMegszents\u00e9gtelen\u00edthetetlens\u00e9gesked\u00e9seitek\u00e9rt,\u201d which translates roughly as \u201cthe impossibility of your canonization.\u201d What\u2019s more, a tiny change to the suffixes can alter the meaning of a word entirely.<\/p>\n\n

Not only that\u2014verbs are conjugated in either of two ways depending on whether you use a definite or indefinite object. German speakers get a little help from loanwords such as \u201csl\u00e1ger\u201d (hit song) and \u201ckoffer\u201d (suitcase), which sound similar in both languages.<\/p>\n\n

Polish<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n

Surprised to see Polish<\/a> on this list? We think its tough pronunciation justifies its presence among the top five. Polish has eight vowel sounds and is dominated by consonants, with words like \u201cchrz\u0105szcz\u201d (beetle) that are real tongue-twisters. The Polish alphabet contains 32 letters plus seven digraphs (ch, cz, dz, d\u017a, d\u017c, rz and sz), meaning sets of two letters that combine to make a single sound.<\/p>\n\n

Interestingly, there are two additional grammatical genders besides masculine, feminine and neuter: masculine animate (used for male animals, for example) and masculine inanimate (used for objects).<\/p>\n\n

Another unique feature: not all Polish verbs can be used for all occasions. Verbs are either perfective or imperfective, depending on whether they describe common and ongoing occurrences or completed events.<\/p>\n\n

Do you need translations into or out of the world\u2019s hardest languages?<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n

Learning a new language is fun, but with rules like the above, it can be a long process. Don\u2019t worry: if you need a foreign language for work, you don\u2019t necessarily have to speak it yourself. At ACT Translations, we speak more than 150 languages\u2014from the most popular and most widely spoken languages in the world<\/em> to the most complex. Our Chinese, Icelandic<\/em>, and Arabic translators are always happy to help you with the texts you need to succeed on the job.<\/p>\n\n

What languages do we still translate into and out of?<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Language is such an important part of people\u2019s identity and culture that the European Union has defined linguistic diversity as one of its fundamental values. According to the EU Commission, all Europeans should be able to speak two foreign languages by 2025. The average European speaks just 2.32 languages today\u2014including their native language. But what\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":16770,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1195],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24556","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-languages-en-gb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.act-translations.com\/en-gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24556","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.act-translations.com\/en-gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.act-translations.com\/en-gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.act-translations.com\/en-gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.act-translations.com\/en-gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24556"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.act-translations.com\/en-gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24556\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25188,"href":"https:\/\/www.act-translations.com\/en-gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24556\/revisions\/25188"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.act-translations.com\/en-gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16770"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.act-translations.com\/en-gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24556"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.act-translations.com\/en-gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24556"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.act-translations.com\/en-gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24556"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}