Mandarin and Arabic often top the list of languages that are hardest to learn. But what do native speakers of those languages find the hardest to master, and why? Alex Billings, Lincoln

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Readers reply

English: the language in which you can be said to chop a tree down, only to then chop that same tree up. RawSharkTest

I think English would probably be the hardest to learn. They have to learn a whole new alphabet and they also have to learn the complicated pronunciation of English words. Muhammed Imran

As a native Arabic speaker, I find Russian, Mandarin and Hindi are hardest to learn. Khalid Saleh

I don’t speak Mandarin, but I can converse in Cantonese fluently. One must make sure of the number of strokes – and their placement – in a chinese character. If you miss out any stroke, the whole meaning of the character will change. N Moshtaq

I don’t know enough about Arabic, but Chinese, Japanese and Russian have no articles. I’ve had students who spoke those languages. Their biggest problems were articles, ie “the” or “a”/“an”. When they learn German – I live in Germany – they also have three versions of “the” (der, die, das), and then four cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative). Mind you, Russian has six cases and Finnish 16, so it could be worse.) In Russian, you can just say: “Book on table.” There’s no need to write: “The book is on the table.”

Even though English and German have articles, they don’t use them in the same way. You don’t generally use the definite article with abstract nouns in English, but you do with German, eg “Er wartete auf den tod” - “He waited for [the] death”. nina1414

As someone whose second language is Mandarin, I would dispute it is hard to learn, but Mandarin and Arabic are sort of opposites syntactically. Mandarin is highly analytical (very little morphology or grammar to remember; words don’t generally change sound) and Arabic is highly agglutinative (words consist of multiple morphemes and change a lot; lots of grammar to learn), so they are probably mutually even more difficult than either is for an English speaker (English being somewhere between synthetic and analytic).

Phonology (Chinese: tones; Arabic: back-of-the-throat stuff) and writing systems present extra challenges. The further the distance from what one is used to, the harder to learn, I suppose. Polish speakers are often clear speakers of Mandarin because they have a similar retroflex/palatal distinction in their affricates that often throws learners.

Some languages just look hard for anyone. Kalaallisut [Greenlandic] and Pirahã [an indigenous Brazilian language] have always topped my list of languages I wouldn’t touch with a bargepole; I doubt they would be much easier for an Arabic or Mandarin speaker. bcpMartin

A former Chinese-English translator and interpreter here. Mandarin is my first language, although I rarely use it nowadays as I am employed by a Swedish company.

Mandarin speakers encounter challenges when learning various languages, given the stark differences between Mandarin and other languages. Some individuals may argue that Mandarin is similar to Japanese, but this is incorrect. While a typical Japanese text does incorporate kanji (Chinese characters), they adhere to an entirely distinct pronunciation and grammatical structure. Furthermore, Mandarin differs significantly from other Asian languages, including Korean, Thai and Vietnamese.

Now, let’s consider European languages. Are they exceptionally difficult for Mandarin speakers? The answer depends on certain factors. If Mandarin speakers possess a command of English, they will find it considerably easier to learn some European languages, such as French and Spanish. I am learning Swedish, solely relying on English as my medium of instruction. If a learner lacks proficiency in English, mastering European languages becomes incredibly challenging. Additionally, finding learning resources in Mandarin for specific languages such as Danish, Swedish and Norwegian can prove difficult.

Certain languages present difficulties to learners regardless of their native tongue. Finnish poses such challenges. Recently, I have undertaken the study of Swahili, due to potential clients based in that region. My local contacts find it amusing that a native Mandarin speaker can converse in their language, at least to some extent. Xavier Chen

I’ve taught Finnish to foreigners, and Arabic and Chinese native speakers struggle with it just as much as Europeans, but for different reasons. Speakers of Indo-European languages find the case inflection hard, while Arabic speakers have only three vowels (Finnish is rich in vowels and diphthongs). Chinese speakers struggle with cases and pronunciation. Apart from Estonian, Turkish is the only language which gives you an advantage in learning Finnish. Despite not being related linguistically, the similarities are surprising: agglutination and suffixes, vowel harmony, consonant gradation, genderless pronouns and more. Mikko_

I have many friends from South Tyrol in Italy. Their first language is German and their second is Italian, although they all seem to be fluent in both. When they are talking in a group, they fluidly switch from one to the other, depending on which language best suits what they are trying to say. However, what always makes me smile is that when they switch their spoken language, they switch their body language, too. Italian is accompanied with extravagant gestures, German with slight and subtle ones. HaeYou

I am a native speaker of Mandarin Chinese in my early 30s and have experience learning a number of other languages since my school years. I went on to pursue a PhD in linguistics at Cambridge. Looking back at my own language-learning journey, I would say what I have considered hard to learn in a language has kept changing.

The first language I learned after Mandarin and English was Japanese (at the age of 14). I remember finding it complex, but not daunting, and acquired its pronunciation and grammar quite smoothly (although I have forgotten a lot by now). However, I do remember being much troubled by the kanji (for a long time, well into my late teens) because the Mandarin pronunciations of the characters were too deep-rooted in me and I could not efficiently shift my brain to the Japanese mode when seeing them. This also happened when I tried to learn Cantonese at 17, to the extent that I actually found it easier to learn the vocabulary by alphabetic spelling. On the other hand, Korean is probably the easiest east Asian language for Mandarin speakers (or at least for me), as all hanja words are explicitly spelled out in hangul (the Korean alphabet). As a result, when learning Korean (at 16), I found my knowledge of Chinese characters a good helper instead of a troublemaker.

Apart from the above-mentioned trouble, I was not really hindered by vocabulary learning in my teens (besides laziness). However, vocabulary did become a major problem for me in the second phase of my language-learning journey – after I had received some linguistics enlightenment in university (I went to BFSU, the best university in China for language learners).

The problem was that I became so obsessed with making sense of everything that whenever my “why” question failed to get a logical answer (eg why a certain noun is masculine instead of feminine), I got upset. In addition, I attached too much importance to understanding the grammatical system of a language at the linguistic level and forgot to actually learn the words. A contrast I often reflect on is that between my learning experience of French (at 15) and German (at 20). Both languages were pretty alien to me as a Chinese person, yet my acquisition of French had been much easier. In hindsight, I think it was because I had mainly learned French by listening and repeating, without doing much thinking, but had focused too much on “metalinguistic” understanding when learning German (which unfortunately is not the most neatly logical language, especially as regards its noun system).

After realising that my passion for linguistics was actually holding me back as a language learner, I adjusted my strategy and entered the third phase of my language-learning journey (after getting my PhD), which we may call the “atavistic” phase. In this phase, I no longer consciously view myself as a linguist when learning new languages (or relearning old ones), but simply do what a child does (and what I had done in phase one): listen/see and repeat. It turns out that rote learning is the best strategy after all, at least for me (and, surprisingly, it helped cure my post-Covid brain fog, too).

To be honest, at this point, nothing about a LANGUAGE can be described as “hard to learn” any more. I learn vocabulary and build muscle memory in a “childish” way, but, at the same time, my knowledge of linguistics (despite my deliberate suppression of it) also means very few issues about pronunciation or grammar can confuse me.

I capitalised “language” above because, interestingly, the only real trouble I still have in language learning in phase three comes from writing systems, which are not considered part of language per se in a professional linguistic sense. Hence writing systems are also hard to learn for children, even though they are language-learning geniuses. I guess the real challenges of Mandarin (or any other Chinese variety) and Arabic come not from their language, but from their scripts. I have never learned Arabic, but I do think languages with complex writing systems are the hardest of all the languages I have tried learning. (These are Hebrew, Manchu and Hindi/Sanskrit.)

A lesson my years-long language-learning (and linguistics-studying) experience has taught me is that what makes a “hard” language hard to learn is not necessarily an intrinsic property of the language, but may well be a culturally significant yet linguistically secondary aspect such as writing. Julio Song