It's often said that French is a difficult language to master...
Which languages do you think are the most difficult?
Zoom in on 4 languages that will give you a hard time!
Mandarin Chinese: the most difficult to speak
It's the world's most widely spoken language, with over 1.2 billion native speakers. It is rich in homophones (two different words with the same pronunciation) and idioms, making it particularly difficult to learn. What's more, each sound can have four distinct pronunciations. Add to this its 200 different dialects, and you have the most difficult language for a European to learn.
Arabic: the most difficult to read
Everyone knows that Arabic is read from right to left, which is no mean feat for a French speaker. But did you know that each letter has four different spellings depending on its position in a word? And that vowels are not included in the written form? All this makes Arabic one of the most difficult languages to translate!
Finnish: the most complex to remember
This Nordic language has an extremely complex grammar, with up to 15 different declensions. Forget prepositions and pronouns, Finnish is an "agglutinative" language that prefers to use suffixes. Last but not least, verbs, nouns, pronouns and numbers evolve according to their role in a sentence.
Hungarian: Europe's most atypical
Hungarian is one of the most difficult European languages to learn, as its vocabulary and grammar bear no relation to Indo-European languages. It is not a Latin language, but a Finno-Ugric language belonging to the Uralic family. It is, however, highly complex, with 35 verbal endings, compared with only 6 in French. Its alphabet, based on the Latin alphabet, comprises 42 letters, including 14 vowels. Word order is flexible, and many terms are formed by the addition of suffixes, which can be confusing for a French speaker.
Try your hand at pronunciation, with words as basic as "üdvözöljük!" ("welcome!"), "köszönöm" ("thank you") and "egészségedre! ("cheers!").
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