What is the hardest language to learn?
The answer to this question is that it depends on which languages you already know. Children
acquire their native language or languages without difficulty, whether it’s English,
Arabic, Mandarin, or any other. In that sense, all spoken languages are equally easy for
children to acquire. But generally, when it comes to learning a second language as an
adult, the more different the language is to the one or ones you already know, the more
difficult it will be to learn it.
Take, for example, a Spanish speaker who is learning Portuguese. The two languages have
an 89% lexical similarity, which measures how similar words in both languages are. This
is very high and makes sense as both are Romance languages that descended from Latin, much
like French and Italian. And so, learning those languages will also be relatively easy.
But that doesn’t mean it’s a walk in the park. There are grammatical and pronunciation
differences between these languages, and the Spanish speaker will have to learn all of
those key differences in order to become fluent. Likewise, the lexical similarity between Russian
and Ukrainian is 86%, and so we would expect a similar level of ease when a native Russian
speaker attempts to learn Ukrainian or vice versa.
On the other extreme, if a native speaker of a European language like English, German,
French, or Spanish, decides to learn Mandarin or Hungarian, the challenge will be much greater.
Not only is there nearly no vocabulary in common, but the pronunciation and grammar
are significantly different. For example, Mandarin uses tones, where the pitch that
you use to pronounce a word is phonemic, meaning that changing the pitch actually changes the
meaning of the word. In English, if you say “You are going” vs “You are going?,”
the change in pitch only differentiates whether the phrase is a statement or question, or
whether it’s sarcastic, but it doesn’t change the meanings of the three words. “Going”
refers to the same action as “going.” In Mandarin, by contrast, changing the tone
changes the meaning of the word. So 媽 means “mom” whereas 马 means “horse,” certainly
two words you don’t want to confuse. On the other hand, Mandarin word order is similar
to English and the verb and adjective endings don’t change, so there are some elements
that make it simpler to learn for an English speaker than, for example, a Romance language
where you have to learn many different conjugations for the large number of verb tenses and moods.
Having said this, if you are willing to put in the necessary time and effort, you can
learn any spoken language, no matter what your native language. But what about learning
to read and write? The writing systems in English and Spanish, for example, both use
the Latin (or Roman) script, so if you are a native speaker of English learning to read
and write in Spanish, all you have to do is learn the pronunciation of the symbols, but
you are already familiar with the symbols themselves and what kind of things they stand
for. And, in the case of English and Spanish, most of them represent similar sounds.
But, for example, it is much harder for someone familiar with the Latin script to learn to
read and write in Hebrew or Arabic. Not only are the symbols completely different, but
these scripts are abjads, meaning that for the most part only consonants are written,
and you have to know the word in order to supply the correct vowel. And as the cherry
on top, they are written and read from right to left. For example, my name is written נתן,
which represents an n sound, a t sound, and another n. You have to know that word to know
that it’s not pronounced Naten or Neten. But still, these scripts represent sounds
and have a relatively limited number of letters, 22 in Hebrew and 28 in Arabic, although there
are additional variations depending on the position of the letters in a word. So it’s
definitely doable.
Learning a logographic writing system, like Mandarin, is much more challenging. In the
Latin script, the t symbol represents the “tuh” sound, but the symbol itself has
no inherent meaning. In contrast, in Mandarin each symbol represents a unit of meaning,
usually parts of words or entire words. A lot of people think these symbols are all
pictograms or ideograms that represent the images of the things they refer to, and some
of them are, like the one for mountain. But actually, over 80% of the symbols are phono-semantic
compounds, which means that they have a part that refers to the meaning and a part that
indicates the pronunciation in Old Chinese. In any case, the issue with the Chinese script
is that in order to read and write fluently, you need to know between three and four thousand
characters, so learning a system like this will require much more time and effort.