For whatever odd reason, be it, Indiana Jones, X-Men: First Class, Sucker Punch, or Knight and Day, it seems like so many movies I’ve watched over the past week are popping up with sections of the movie in German. That made me ask, “What is the hardest language to learn?”. They will then find that the answer is a complicated one. This is because the answer is subjective (opinion) and also depends on what your native language is. While no language is simple to learn, those that are more closely related to your native language are going to be easier. Learning a completely different and exotic writing system can also be a big challenge, but that does not necessarily make a language more difficult.
Since it’s impossible to say with certainty that there is a language that qualifies as “most difficult”, we’ve provided a handy infographic below that will give you a general idea of difficulty of the most common languages. The statistics and rankings included are provided by the the Foreign Service Institute (FSI) of the US Department of State and are intended for native English speakers.