It consists of some extinct languages, including Thracian, Illyrian and Dacian, while also featuring some grammar rules and vocabulary from Greek and Latin. Where its most commonly spoken: Thailand. A 2010 study that looked at immigrants to the Netherlands who were learning Dutch found that people who spoke languages with a lot of Dutch cognates such as Swedish, German, and Danish did better on a Dutch language exam compared to people who spoke languages with few Dutch cognates, such as French and Greek. Another difficult language is Russian. Greek. But did you know that there are more than 10 different Slavic languages? The Top 5 Hardest Languages to Learn for English Speakers Most Ukrainians can speak Russian and many speak what has been labelled Surzhyk a blend of Russian and Ukrainian so measuring who speaks what is challenging. Where its most commonly spoken: Iran, Afghanistan. It is pretty foreign to English speakers, but if you speak Japanese, Korean, or Finnish (which are all also on this list), you won't have such a hard time grasping it. For instance, while the language is made up of Latin letters, many letters sound entirely different. Someone who speaks German, someone who speaks Farsi, and someone who speaks Vietnamese will likely have massive differences in what languages they find easy or hard to pick up, because the native languages theyre starting with are so dissimilar from one another. Also, like other Slavic languages, Russian distinguishes three genders: male, female, and neuter. From Chinese sentence structure to memorizing foreign symbols, this language demands the most out of beginners. Descending from the ancient South Asian language of Sanskrit, Hindi is a phonetic language, but many sounds are foreign to English speakers. Great job defending the Russian language and Russian speakers, Putin! The phrase I speak Spanish would be yo hablo Espaol, while you speak Spanish would be tu hablas Espaol.. Arabic is a language most Mandarin speakers will find challenging. On the one hand, each letter only has one pronunciation ever. It is spoken as a native language by 13 million people, most of whom live in Hungary. It is always a state project.. The Complete List of Language Difficulty Rankings In fact, the further the languages are classified from each other, the fewer similarities they have. Compared to the Finno-Ugric languages on the list (Finnish, Hungarian, Estonian), the seven cases you have to contend with in Polish don't seem too intimidating. Among the most challenging aspects of learning Japanese is the writing system, which contains tens of thousands of characters referred to as kanji.. Boasting a whopping 300 million speakers, Russian is one of the more popular languages globally. For more on the Czech language, see this comparison of Czech with Russian and German.