NY 10036. In both languages, there are several different degrees of politeness you can use, ranging from the formal to the familiar. The alphabet is made of very elaborate characters; the language is tonal; there are lots of idioms, and the ability to speak the language doesn't help you read it. In this article, you’ll learn about 10 popular languages and their difficulty levels from our language learning friend, Julie Petersen… Language difficulty is a hard thing to calculate. Want to take on a new challenge in your life? Therefore, individual characters tend to be similar in both appearance and meaning from Japanese to Chinese, although some differences have arisen over time.Beyond kanji, Japanese also uses sets of characters called Japanese writing isn’t the only brain-stretching aspect of the language for native English speakers. What is the hardest language to learn for English speakers? 7 Reasons the UK is the Best Place to Learn English . Category III languages, which are harder still, include Russian and Hebrew and the course length goes up to 48 weeks. These are the 6 hardest languages for English speakers to learn. Arabic is a highly inflected language with many rules that may surprise English speakers. All languages are evolved to be as easy to learn as possible, and there’s nothing that makes any one language inherently more difficult to learn than another.Even though no given language is more difficult to learn in a vacuum, some languages will differ more from your native language in terms of syntax, word order, writing system, vocabulary and so on.Still, when we say these languages are “harder” to learn, all we really mean is that they take longer to learn. For instance, while the Japanese language has been touted as one of the most difficult languages for Americans to master, it is not so for Chinese speakers.The reason Japanese is so hard for native English speakers, according to Richard Brecht, director at the Center for Advanced Study of Language at the University of Maryland, has to do with the complex Japanese is ranked by the U.S. Foreign Services Institute as the most difficult language for native English speakers to learn. Depending on how easy or hard a language is to learn, you can have varying practice times, materials, and degrees of discipline. They’re just less familiar and thus take more time. With a good plan and Okay, so the downside to learning one of the hardest languages for native English speakers to learn is obvious: You need to set aside more time than if you were learning an “easy” language.The whole thing that makes these languages hard to learn is how different they are from English. While most people try to look for the easiest foreign languages to master, others seek the more difficult ones that provide the thrill of learning. All Rights Reserved. Learn one of the five hardest languages for English speakers. When it comes to the amount of time it takes to learn a language, the hardest ones can take more than three times as long as the easiest ones. These are the 6 hardest languages for English speakers to learn. Nothing makes these languages inherently harder to learn. More importantly, Chinese is pretty much the polar opposite of Arabic as far as inflection goes: Whereas Arabic is highly inflected, Chinese is minimally inflected.So no need to worry about gender or verb conjugation when learning Chinese. That said, Chinese grammar is actually fairly simple for English speakers to pick up. Any language is going to take time and effort to learn, and Japanese in particular presents more challenges to a native English speaker than many other languages. A billion people are learning English around the world and most of them are struggling with the same things. Since learning a language also gives you access to the culture associated with that language, learning an especially unfamiliar language is a nice two-for-the-price-of-one deal where you also get to know an especially unfamiliar culture.The harder the language you choose to learn, the more it’ll stretch your language learning skills. For that matter, no need to worry even about singular vs. plural or tense. Let’s take a look at them and why they might interest you.The most obvious way Arabic differs from English is the alphabet. There’s no shortage of different ways to learn English.