Nowadays, technology has increasingly developed in various countries. Such development makes communications across countries easier to do through social media. From the communication exchange, a newfound enthusiasm to learn new languages has awakened. Do you know what are the most difficult languages in the world?

Some examples of languages that are hard to understand for Indonesians are Japanese or Mandarin Chinese. Those languages have distinct pronunciations and more complex writing systems. However, it turns out that there are many other foreign languages that are also hard to learn! Pruf Ritz will explain some of those languages.

Romani Language (Romani)

Romani language or Roman is an Indo-Aryan language used by the majority of the Romani people. The language is divided again into seven types with the same root. The Romani language is different with the Roman languages or Romans. The examples of Roman languages are French, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, and Italian.

The speakers of Romani language are called the gypsy speakers and the Spanish gitanos. It is estimated that two and a half million of Romani speakers are inhabiting North Africa and West Asia. The rest are spread in the United States and Brazil. The difficulties of the Romani language lie in its pronunciation and vastly diverse dialects.

Chinese Language

Chinese language is currently spoken by many people. However, it is actually considered a difficult language to learn. The writing system that only uses kanji characters become one of the contributing factors.

For language speakers who are used to latin alphabets, it requires a great deal of effort to memorize thousands of kanji characters. In terms of pronunciation, Chinese language has several dialects. Each dialect also requires the learners to memorize different kanji characters.

Paraguayan Language

Learning Paraguayan language is very challenging even if you are fluent in Spanish. This language is considered difficult because it uses two different languages in its practice and both are related to each other.

Most of the Paraguayan people speak Guarani language. Guarani is a traditional Paraguayan language. One of the reasons why this language is difficult to learn is because there are no clear rules regarding the position of Subject in the Subject-Predicate-Object pattern.

Furthermore, although it is mentioned that Spanish is also spoken in Paraguay, the speakers should understand Guarani language in order to comprehend the dialect of Paraguayan Spanish.

Arabic Language

Arabic language has so many different accents depending on the country or region. The Arabic language in a certain country might have entirely different pronunciations in other Middle Eastern countries. The writing system also does not use the alphabets.

The pronunciation in Arabic language is also quite challenging. Additionally, the grammatical rules used in this language are fairly complicated because the verbs tend to precede the subjects. You also need to learn the forms of dual, singular, and plural words.

Russian Language

Russian language uses Cyrillic script that is different with the alphabets that we know. The Cyrillic script has similarities with Latin letters. However, there are differences in terms of pronunciation and word arrangement. For instance, the letter “B” in Cyrillic script is read as “V”. This is particularly confusing if your learn Latin and Russian letters simultaneously.

Japanese Language

Japanese language has three writing systems, which are hiragana, katakana, and kanji. Japanese kanji are different from Chinese kanji despite having several characters with the same meanings. If you want to distinguish Japanese writing with that of Chinese, observe whether there are hiragana and katakana scripts following the kanji.

The Japanese language also has a lot of grammatical rules. With five level of difficulties from N5 to N1 (Noryokushiken Level 5 to 1), Japanese language also possesses hundreds of grammatical rules (bunpo) that need to be understood contextually. Another example is the use of katakana to spell loanwords from outside the Japanese language. Japanese people do not have consonants in their language. Therefore, when using loanwords from foreign languages using katakana, their accent can sound entirely different.

Those are 6 most difficult languages in the world that you need to know. Does it fire up your enthusiasm in learning one of the languages? If you have no time and you want to understand a document from any of those six languages, contact the Pruf Ritz team to help you translate it. Happy learning!