Dear Duolingo: What are the hardest languages to learn

Dear Duolingo: What are the hardest languages to learn?

These 5 languages really put learners to the test. Are you up to the challenge?

Welcome to another week of Dear Duolingo, an advice column just for learners. Catch up on past installments here.

Hello learners! This is Dr. Emilie Zuniga back again on Dear Duolingo! Last time, I wrote about unnecessary words, and this week I'm here to answer a different sort of question-one that draws on my training as a linguist and hyperpolyglot.

Our question this week:

The short answer is that there isn't a single hardest language to learn. There isn't even a single hardest language for English speakers to learn! Sigh.

Top hardest languages to learn

That's because what makes a language easy or hard depends on the language(s) you already know, rather than on objective criteria. The more different a language is from your own language (say, English), the harder it will be for you to learn it.

Here are a few factors that matter when considering how hard a language is to learn:

• writing system
• sound inventory and rules for combining sounds in words
• grammatical complexity (things like word order, case system, etc)
• how different the culture is and to what extent it's reflected in the grammar

With these factors in mind, we can point to several languages that are strong candidates for the title.

So, in no particular order, here are five of the most interesting candidates for the hardest language to learn!

Japanese

Japanese belongs to the Japonic language family and is often considered a language isolate-it's not part of a big language family like the Romance languages. In fact, it is closely related to the Ryukyuan languages of Okinawa, but otherwise, Japanese is uniquely challenging.

What makes Japanese hard for learners

Writing systems. Yes, you read that right, systems, plural! Japanese has three distinct writing systems, and each contains not only different characters but different ways of conceptualizing speech. If you know a language that uses an alphabet, like the Latin alphabet, for its writing system, these three systems can be especially challenging: Two of them (hiragana and katakana) are syllabaries, and the third (kanji) is a logographic script, and each has its own characters and complexities.

Levels of politeness. All languages have ways to be more or less polite, but Japanese takes things to the next level. Its politeness system makes distinctions that don't exist in many other cultures, and it is embedded in Japanese grammar in a way that can make it complex for learners. Which of the three levels of politeness you use with the person you're addressing will affect honorifics (word endings that show respect), names and titles, pronouns, and even verb endings!

Zulu

Zulu (which you can learn on Duolingo!) has approximately 12 million native speakers primarily in South Africa. It belongs to the Bantu language family, which is part of the even bigger Niger-Congo group. Other languages in the Bantu family include Xhosa, Swahili, Shona, and Setswana.

What makes Zulu hard for learners

Sound system. The sounds of Zulu include two challenges for learners: clicks and tones. Unlike some sounds you'll encounter in a new language, clicks are pretty easy to hear… but they are tough for new learners to produce, especially in actual words! Zulu also has a tonal system, and while it's less likely to get you into trouble than Mandarin Chinese tones, it's not easy for speakers of non-tonal languages (like English) to recognize the changes in pitch that can be the only difference between one word and another. (Not to mention learning to make those pitch changes, too!) For example, uyacula means both "you are singing" and "she/he/it is singing"-and while the written form is the same for both, it's pronounced with a different tone depending on the meaning. A lower pitch on u- means "you," while a higher pitch indicates "she/he/it."

Noun classes. If you thought remembering feminine vs. masculine nouns in Spanish and French was enough to give you a headache, wait until you learn about Zulu: Here you'll find 15 (or up to 19!) different categories of nouns, called noun classes. Which class a noun belongs to determines the form of other words in the sentence, such as verbs, adjectives, pronouns, etc. so getting it right is important to clear communication. Some categories have grammatical functions (those are the easy ones ), while other classes are based on word meaning and can be harder to predict. At the start, learners need to memorize each noun and its noun class together!

!Xóõ (Taa)

!Xóõ (Taa) is another African language, and the "!" at the start of its name represents a click! But unlike Zulu, !Xóõ belongs to the Tuu branch of a totally different language group, the Khoisan family. It is spoken in Botswana and Namibia and is considered endangered, with only around 3,000 speakers.

What makes !Xóõ hard for learners

!Xóõ has quite a lot to offer learners up for a challenge: noun classes, agglutination (a way of combining many kinds of meanings into just one word), and a tonal system. But what is !Xóõ most famous for?

Number of sounds. Languages vary in the number of sounds they use, but !Xóõ may very well have the most in the world. There are (at least) four "base" clicks that can have a number of variants (like nasalized and aspirated versions), yielding dozens of click sounds. The other, non-click consonants can also be combined with different features-and this isn't even to mention all the vowels. The exact number of individual sounds is a matter of debate, but the range is roughly between 100 and 170, with as many as 80 clicks (!). For comparison: English has around 44 individual sounds!

Arabic

Arabic is a Semitic language, which is part of the large Afro-Asiatic family. Arabic is spoken by over 310 million people across the Middle East and North Africa, and by the diaspora around the world.

What makes Arabic hard for learners

Writing system. If you want to read and write in Arabic, you'll need to learn an alphabet probably very different from others you know:

• It's written right to left.
• The letters change shapes slightly (and not so slightly ) depending on where they appear in a word. For example, the letter ج (jiim) is pronounced like the -ge in mirage in the variety of Arabic that I speak. That's how it looks in isolation, but it's also the first letter (on the right) in the word جار (jaar, "neighbor") and the last letter (on the left) in the word ثلج (thalj, "snow"). Pretty different, right?
• Not all vowels are written out, which means you need to know lots of words before you can recognize them while reading and know how to pronounce them. Imagine reading the English word RD and knowing it could be red, rid, rod, rad, etc. The context helps you figure out the word's meaning (and so its pronunciation), and Arabic's root and pattern system allows speakers to accurately predict some words and pronunciations even without context!

Sounds. Arabic has many sounds that don't exist in English. For example, it has two different kinds of h's: a softer one like the "h" in house, and a "deeper" one that doesn't have an English equivalent, which starts the word حبيبي (Habiibii) "my love." To produce this new sound, get close to a mirror or window, open your mouth big and try fogging it up. Nice work! You're producing Arabic H! (Now, on to all the other sounds )

The many Arabics. There are many kinds of Arabic-and to fully participate in life in Arabic-speaking countries, you'll need to be familiar with at least two varieties: the spoken local dialect of Arabic, which you'll hear in daily life, informal conversations, local media, etc., *and* Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), which is used in the news, literature, official documents, much of secular and religious education, etc. There's also Quranic Arabic-the Arabic of the Quran-and because of the central place of the Quran in Arab cultures, the words (and grammar!) that it contains have been prevented from disappearing from the language, even while the other varieties of Arabic have changed. As a learner of Arabic, you won't need to know all the words from the local dialect, MSA and the Quran in order to make friends and understand what you hear in an Arabic-speaking country-but if you're interested in diving deeper, be prepared to encounter lots and lots (and lots!) of words!

Georgian

Georgian, a language from the Kartvelian family, is spoken by around 4 million people primarily in Georgia, a country in the Caucasus region that borders Turkey, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Russia.

What makes Georgian hard for learners

Sounds. Any time you learn a language, you'll encounter new sounds-but Georgian has an entire category of sounds that are likely unfamiliar to you. These sounds are called ejectives, and they make a strong "pop" sound in your throat while you're also pronouncing "p," "t," "k," and other sounds. Like clicks, they're typically easy to hear but harder to produce, so you'll need lots of practice!

Word order. In Georgian, the verb usually appears at the end of the sentence. For example, instead of saying He ate fruit, you'll say He fruit ate. This is called SOV word order because the subject comes first, then the object, and then the verb, and it's actually more common across the world's languages than the SVO word order that's typical in English!

Case system. The most complex part of Georgian grammar for English speakers is probably its case system. If you've studied German, Russian, Greek, or many other languages, you're used to thinking about cases: There's nominative case for subjects, accusative for direct objects, etc. But there's an important difference between these and the Georgian case system: It has a hybrid case system.

In German, Russian, and Greek-and even in English, which long ago lost most of its case system-what counts as a subject is basically the same across different kinds of verbs, whether or not the verb also has an object:

• [no object] The dog runs fast.
• [object] The dog eats meat.

However, there's a whole other way languages can organize their cases-where the subjects of the no-object verbs have a different form than the subjects of the verbs that do take objects In those languages, the subject of the no-object verbs has the same case as the direct object of the verbs with objects!

But don't worry, Georgian doesn't work like that… instead, it has a combination of *both* systems! So if you are an English speaker learning Georgian, that means you'll be learning not one but two case systems, and then figuring out when to use each. Now that's a serious brain workout!

Don't be deterred by "hard" languages

Whether you pick an "easy" or "hard" language to learn, you're in for a fascinating journey full of linguistic and cultural discovery! No language is impossible to learn, and no language has more value because a particular group finds it harder to learn. Languages represent real people, with their history, wisdom, beliefs, and everything else that makes them human.

For more answers to your language and learning questions, get in touch with us by emailing [email protected].

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