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In the Foreign Service Institute’s language classification system, the most difficult languages are at Category 5. These take 88 weeks or 2,200 hours of classroom time to reach proficiency.
This is a list of languages by total number of speakers. It is difficult to define what constitutes a language as opposed to a dialect . For example, Chinese and Arabic are sometimes considered single languages, but each includes several mutually unintelligible varieties , and so they are sometimes considered language families instead.
There are other rankings of language difficulty as the one by The British Foreign Office Diplomatic Service Language Centre which lists the difficult languages in Class I (Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin); the easier languages are in Class V (e.g. Afrikaans, Bislama, Catalan, French, Spanish, Swedish). [12]
Chinese is rated as one of the most difficult languages to learn for people whose native language is English, together with Arabic, Japanese and Korean. [28] According to the Foreign Service Institute, a native English speaker needs over 2,200 hours of intensive study, taking 88 weeks (one year and about 8 months), to learn Mandarin. [29]
The following languages are listed as having at least 50 million first-language speakers in the 27th edition of Ethnologue published in 2024. [7] This section does not include entries that Ethnologue identifies as macrolanguages encompassing all their respective varieties , such as Arabic , Lahnda , Persian , Malay , Pashto , and Chinese .
Some speakers find it difficult to distinguish between the initials /n/ and /l/. No labiodental phonemes, such as /f/ or /v/, exist in the Fuzhou dialect, which is one of the most conspicuous characteristics shared by all branches in the Min Family. [β] and [ʒ] exist only in connected speech (see Initial assimilation below).
Most difficult language to learn → Comparative difficulty of languages for native English speakers — The difficulty of a language depends highly on what languages you already speak. The present title, however, implies that there is a "most difficult language" in absolute terms, which is not the general view in linguistics as far as I can see.
How many of these can you say without stumbling? The post 40 of the Hardest Tongue Twisters in the English Language appeared first on Reader's Digest.