FX.co ★ World's hardest languages to learn

1st place - Tabasaran

Tabasaran is officially recognized as the most difficult language on the planet. According to the latest data, today, it is spoken by about 130 thousand people living mainly in the southern part of Dagestan. The main problems in learning this language could be explained by the huge number of cases, which exceeds 250. Tabasaran even got into the Guinness Book of Records because of the number of cases it has. In addition, this language is characterized by rather unusual phonetics, including trembling and semantic consonants, as well as guttural sounds, which are very difficult to master.

2nd place - Chinese

This language is one of the oldest in the world. Its history goes back several millennia. During this time, the Chinese invented more than 80 thousand characters, but today only 7 thousand of them are actively used. For comparison, the English alphabet consists of only 26 letters. The Chinese language is considered really difficult to learn as it does not have usual grammatical forms and structures, such as declensions or conjugations. The decisive role in understanding the phrase is played by context, word order, and the intonation with which they are pronounced.

3rd place - Arabic

Despite being difficult to learn, Arabic is considered one of the most widely spoken languages in the world. Today, almost 1.6 billion people worldwide speak this language. The Arabic language has several peculiarities. For example, words are written from right to left only in capital letters. Also, in writing, words are not hyphenated, and vowel sounds are not displayed. In addition, in this language, there are not two but three numbers: singular, dual, which is used when listing two objects, and plural.

4th place – Japanese

This language is considered one of the most beautiful in the world. However, to master it, you will need a lot of time and effort. The main difficulty in learning Japanese is the huge number of characters (about 3 thousand), which have several pronunciation variants depending on the context. Also, in Japanese, there are several types of writing: hiragana, katakana, and kanji, which causes additional difficulties for those who want to master it.

5th place - Russian

The Russian language, which has a lot of grammatical rules and exceptions, closes the rating. A complex case system is the biggest difficulty for foreigners learning Russian. One more pitfall is the richness of the vocabulary. In Russian, there is a huge number of phraseological units and synonyms, the use of which depends on the context. Finally, Russian is characterized by unusual phonetics. It has sounds that are not typical of many other languages.