According to the magazine Ethnologue, there are about 7,100 languages in the world, the following being the most widely spoken: English (1,132 million speakers), Spanish (534 million), French (280 million), Russian (258 million) and Portuguese ( 234 million) . If you have ever considered learning a foreign language other than English, whether for personal or professional reasons, surely you are interested in knowing which are the most difficult languages in the world. Those that, for some reason, are very difficult to learn.
Arab
The first thing to keep in mind is that Arabic is a macro language. That is, a set of different languages related to each other that do not have a specific name, but are considered a single language. Grammar is the main barrier when learning this language as it uses a verb-subject-complement structure .
To this we must add that the letters can have up to four different shapes depending on the location they have in a word . Of course, it should not be forgotten that Arabic has its own writing system. It is written from right to left.
Mandarin Chinese
The second place in the ranking is for Mandarin Chinese. There are many reasons why it is considered one of the most difficult languages in the world: words whose meaning changes depending on the context, five tones whose differences are very difficult to perceive … In addition, the writing system is based on the memorization of thousands of elements.
As if that were not enough, Mandarin Chinese has different dialects , so that the natives of one region of the Asian country may not fully understand those of the neighboring region.
Japanese
Japanese is a language based for the most part on suffixes and prefixes to denote different meanings of the same word. Without a doubt, the most complicated thing for foreigners is writing, based on the kana and kanji spelling systems , to which different phonemes are associated depending on the word.
Therefore, it is a language based on two phonetic alphabets and a grammatical structure that has to be adapted depending on the context. Also, the accent has high and low tones .
However, Japanese also has some advantages: there is only one form of verb for each tense and there is no gender .
