Czech Among World’s TOP 10 Most Difficult Languages for English-Speakers

Insider Monkey recently analyzed the twenty most challenging languages for English speakers to master, and the Czech language features among the top 10.

Arabic, Mandarin Chinese, and Japanese are among the toughest languages for English speakers to learn, particularly due to their complex grammar, writing, and pronunciation systems.

Moreover, Mandarin Chinese is also one of the most spoken native languages in the world. According to data from Ethnologue, it is spoken by over 1 billion speakers around the globe. Mandarin is also one of the most commonly spoken and official dialects of Chinese, spoken by approximately 80% of the Chinese population.

To compile the list of the top 20 languages with the hardest grammar for English speakers, they used the Foreign Services Institute data on Foreign Language Training.

Foreign Services Institute categorizes languages into 4 broad categories based on the number of class hours required to learn a language. For this article, we used Category 3 and Category 4, which require 1,100 and 2,200 class hours for English speakers to learn.

The Foreign Services Institute does not give individual rankings for the languages. Therefore, they employed a consensus methodology to rank our languages. They shifted through the rankings of Berlitz, Busuu, Southwest Journal, Mango Languages, Far and Wide, and Solo Lingual to get a list of 40 languages with the hardest grammar for English speakers.

Then, they selected only those languages that belonged to Category 3 and Category 4 of the Foreign Services Institute data and appeared in at least 3 of our sources. Next, they ranked these languages based on their average rank among our sources. They used the number of mentions as a tie-breaker for instances where two or more languages had the same rank.

Top 20 Languages with the Hardest Grammar for English Speakers:

20. Turkish
19. Russian
18. Tagalog
17. Polish
16. Farsi
15. Serbian
14. Hungarian
13. Bulgarian
12. Croatian
11. Albanian
10. Vietnamese
9. Greek
8. Czech
7. Hindi
6. Thai
5. Finnish
4. Korean
3. Japanese
2. Chinese (Mandarin)
1. Arabic

Source: Insider Monkey