Language Learning (Hard) And there you have it,...

Language Learning (Hard)

And there you have it, the world’s ‘hardest’ languages to learn. I remember reading an article that including Icelandic at the top of the list but that does not seem to be the case here. Here’s what makes them so difficult (according to their studies):

Arabic: lack of cognates, few vowels, difficult prononciation
Chinese: four tones, thousands of characters, complex writing system
Japanese: thousands of characters, three writing systems (hiragana, katakana, kanji)
Korean: different sentence structure/syntax/verb conjugations, some Chinese characters

I expected these four to be on the top but what about Hindi or Thai or Malay? I suppose these are the most commonly studied but having studied Japanese, I wouldn’t call it ‘harder’ than another language, just more involved and perhaps requiring more study time. But that’s just my humble opinion …