The most difficult languages for a Spanish speaker
Not all languages present the same difficulties when studying it, since those that are from the same family as Spanish are naturally more affordable, but those that do not offer greater difficulties.
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In this article, we provide you with the languages that offer the most difficulties to Spaniards, as is logical we expose the reasons for the resistance of these languages.
The most difficult languages for Hispanics to learn
Mandarin Chinese
It is perhaps the language that offers the greatest difficulties. In fact, Mandarin is not only difficult for Latinos, but it is perhaps the most difficult to learn worldwide. But why is this language so complicated? First of all because of its alphabet … Its difficulty lies in its non-existence. Indeed, we cannot learn the Chinese alphabet, for the simple reason that it does not exist; Instead, the Chinese language contains thousands of characters called sinograms.
And this is the problem
We must learn to read, write and pronounce each one of them. But don’t be scared or scared off by this easing obstacle, knowing that you don’t need to know so much to have a normal conversation in and about everyday life!
Now, we must pay close attention to the fact that this language has another characteristic that makes it one of the most difficult languages for Hispanics to learn: Chinese is a language of tone. It means that it has four in total: an ascending tone, a descending tone, an ascending-descending tone and a flat tone. Mistakes are made the moment you use the wrong word, the skill is knowing how to use the correct tone. Therefore, mā (妈) means “mother”, while mǎ (马) means “horse” and mà (骂) means “insult”. And here’s the thing, you should “avoid insulting your mother by calling her a horse.”
German
The truth is that it is not necessary to go to Asia to find a language that is difficult for us to learn. Let’s look at a European language: German. Indeed, German is a type of language that scares Spanish. But what does German have to be classified as one of the languages that offer the most difficulties when learning it? Perhaps, it would suffice to say that his words are sometimes very long and made up of a number of consonants that are scary to see altogether. The classic example says it all: “Geschwindigkeitsbegrenzung”. which means “speed limit”.
In addition, although Germans have three genders which are: masculine, feminine, and neuter, it is not very easy for us to say to guess the gender
In German, it is sometimes somewhat difficult to know what the gender of a name is, at least intuitively. For the less initiated in this language, it will be very difficult to suppose that the words:
- Albert (work)
- Welt (world) and so many others are feminine in German,
- While Mädchen (Girl) is neutral,
They will only be able to approach this reality by learning certain tricks that they identify in the gender of a word. Actually, you just have to pay attention and watch the endings. That is, you have to learn by heart that names that end in –chen- are neutral and those that end in: eit, – heit, -keit – ung are always feminine.
Turkish
Many people fall into the error of affirming that Turkish and Arabic are alike because of their physical proximity. It is still an erroneous thought, because it starts from an observation that is not real, because the Turk uses, in addition to some new letters, his alphabet is closer to Spanish. However, this does not mean that it is easy for Spaniards, since as we already know the difficulty of a language is not limited to its writing. We must bear in mind that Turkish is classified as one of the most difficult languages to learn for different reasons:
- The first reason is vocal harmony . The Turkish phrase “It seems that you have to suffer to be beautiful”, is a saying that can perfectly illustrate what the Turkish language is. In addition, the rules of succession of its vowels require a lot of perseverance for their learning in the effort to fully assimilate the Turkish language, which for many Spanish students is usually torture. However, Turkish has great harmony and beauty that makes us affirm that it is worth the effort to learn this language.
Danish
Danish is a language of the Germanic branch and is related to German ; however, their conjugation is much simpler, while they only use the genitive in declensions. In addition, their words are usually much shorter than German. But despite these characteristics, Danish is far from easy, although it does not offer the same obstacles that German puts us on a Latino. It’s big problem is pronunciation .
In principle we will say that the written and the oral form are two quite different things and this makes pronunciation for learning one of the most difficult in all of Europe . The great difficulty that Danish presents is that it is a language that uses more consonants in writing than in its oral system. Really, for a Spanish it can be very difficult to see so many written consonants that are then absent in the spoken words. A Spaniard, a Frenchman, etc., would go crazy to pronounce the following words: “man”, “tomme”, “like”, “apple”, “gomme” or “sum” all in the same way, that is, “ome ”.
Russian
A Spaniard who begins to study Russian, what strikes him the most at first is his Cyril alphabet, believing that it is the most difficult part of this language. But it is not like that, although at first it shocks us because it is nothing like ours. The drawbacks of Russian, which makes it truly difficult, come next.
Russians are not very satisfied with the decline in common names. And they do the same with proper names: names of cities, countries, people … Anything goes . In addition to that, the variations must respect quite eccentric rules for a Hispanic: the inanimate masculine (that is, objects, for example, a telephone) is thus differentiated from the animated masculine (in other words, human beings – for example, your brother). In addition, the rules for plural declension vary according to the quantity expressed.
This is so badly written my eyes hurt. On top of that, “work” in German isn’t “Albert” but “Arbeit”.
Aargh! Who the heck is Cyril… and his alphabet? A band, perhaps?