Hardest languages to learn (25 ranked)

For myself, I was looking at brushing up on my French and maybe even learn Spanish (or an easy language). I just came across a page in regard to 'hardest' languages to learn, these are ranked.

If you're interested in learning a language, you may want to review the difficulty that language may have for English speakers or those who have English as their first language. Good luck...

Link: 25 Hardest Languages to Learn, Ranked | Far & Wide (farandwide.com)

 

I'm not sure Vietnamese and Danish belong on the same list, but okay. :-D

 

The easiest, conversely, is probably Toki Pona: https://tokipona.org/

 

Counterintuitively, I've seen language learners struggle with languages that are too superficially similar to their native language because they can't seem to keep them separate in their mind. Want to roll some eyes? Try speaking Jamaican Patois without bothering to study the grammar and phonology. "It's just English with some island slang... right???" Or try using ASL signs in English grammatical order "It's just English on your hands... right?"

Some languages are deceptively easy. I'd recommend taking a look at Bahasa if you want to impress your friends with an Asian language that an English speaker can actually pronounce. Since it's spoken in a predominantly multilingual area of the world, there's a lot of wiggle room for second language users to not quite say things right and still avoid cock-eyed glances from strangers.

Other languages are deceptively hard. Americans often think that Spanish is somewhat of a cousin language to English. Hmmm, kinda sorta but not really. Of course, there's lexical similarity through both cultural diffusion and the English appropriation of Latin vocabulary. Beyond that, however, the grammar is only partially similar to English and every sound in the language except for S is phonetically different from its English counterpart.

*I'd even argue that the Spanish S is not quite the same as the English S, even though it's indistinguishable to the ear. If you don't quite tighten your mouth in a certain place in a certain way when you say your S's in Spanish, you are nearly guaranteed to not be able to properly pronounce the sound that follows the S. This is from my subjective experience, not something you'd ever see in a textbook.

 

It made it a lot easier to pick up some Kwéyòl by listening to the way Dominicans speak English. It also helped that other than the adjective following the noun, its grammar is basically like that of English, and that it has no word endings. (What it does have is a lot of idiomatic expressions.)