4 of the most difficult languages for French speakers

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 the most difficult European language to learn, because its vocabulary is completely unrelated to Indo-European languages. It is a Latin language, but has 35 verb endings, compared with 6 in French. Its 42-letter alphabet includes 12 vowels. Word order is flexible, and many terms have to be created from other words to make sense - no easy task for a French speaker!

Try your hand at pronunciation, with words as basic as "üdvözöljük!" ("welcome!"), "köszönöm" ("thank you") and "egészségedre! ("cheers!").