by Shane Hampton

Created on: January 27, 2009

Deciding the hardest language to learn depends on your native language. For example, English is a language that blends elements and words from Germanic, Romance, and Anglo-Saxon languages. Because English is so heavily influenced by these three language families, other languages in those families are closely related to English and a little easier to learn than languages that are in entirely different categories. German and Scandinavian languages tend to be the easiest, closely followed by French, Spanish, and Italian. Even Middle Eastern languages have some elements in common with English.

The hard languages for English speakers tend to be Asian, African, and Native American languages. But there has to be one language that's harder than all the rest, so let's take a close look at a few of the world's most complicated languages to better understand which one might be the hardest of them all.

In Asia, there are a lot of languages that are extremely difficult because of their writing systems. Chinese uses the Hanzi writing system, with 50,000 characters, with each representing a word or syllable. However, to be a fluent reader and writer of Chinese, many studies estimate that you only need to know around 3,500 characters. There are benefits to the system, as well. For instance, China has many dialects of Chinese that are very different from each other in the spoken language, but all Chinese dialects share the same writing system. So, if you learn to read Mandarin Chinese, you can read all of the dialects of Chinese. Another thing that balances out the difficult writing system in Chinese is its easy grammar- there are no tenses, plural nouns, or gendered articles in Chinese, so in the grammatical sense it is far less complicated than languages based on Latin.

Japanese has borrowed thousands of Chinese characters for use in combination with their much simpler hiragana and katakana alphabets, where each character represents a single phonetic sound in a manner similar to Western languages. Korean also has a simple alphabetic writing system where letters are combined into blocks representing syllables. But Japanese and Korean have extremely complex grammars with many tenses and word orders that are not familiar to speakers of English. Finally, there is Vietnamese, which has been written with a system of Roman characters, just like English, since it was colonized by the French in the mid-1800s. But even with the Roman characters, the complex accent marks and diacritics

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