Which language do you think is the furthest from English?

Japanese is insane, 3 alphabets, completely different sentence structure, and spoken quite a bit faster. Not even going to start on honorifics. It really feels like a language from another planet. Would still say its been worth it though.

As a native English speaker, Navajo looks like it would be extremely hard to learn

The linguistic evidence that far back is pretty scant, but the most likely answer is any of the Khoisan languages.

Picking a common language I'd have to go with something like Mandarin or Japanese, purely for the insane number of symbols to remember, learning a new alphabet (I know that applies to others), difference in grammar, the TONES Obscure languages, i don't remember its name but there's a select few in Africa where a lot of it is made by.. I can only describe as mouth sounds? Like tongue clicking in ways we can't even learn

Native U.S. speaker, but I studied Spanish, Mandarin, and Thai in school. Mandarin is probably the furthest from English as a common language. There is no central alphabet, it’s a tonal language (not a thing in English), and the grammar is *literally* backwards for some sentences. On top of that, Chinese doesn’t really have plural or really heavy future/past tenses. Typically a future tense is dictated by “will” (要，会） or with a past tense particle (了）, and then there are other partials such as 吧 for suggestions/politeness. Same with measure words to illustrate what collection of things you are talking about (几口人？ how many people? 几杯茶？ how many glasses of tea? 几节课？ how many classes?) Pronunciation is difficult for English speakers. It’s just a whole different ballgame. You of course have to write Chinese in characters (hanzi, 汉字, not Roman letters) While the absences of plural and such would make life easier, I felt it made it harder for me as I was so used to conjugating and making things plural in English. I’d say something in Chinese and just feel like I was wrong, haha. I’m still a beginner in Chinese to forgive me if I got any of these wrong :)

As far as common languages go, I’d say mandarin.

The greatest challenge? The language you’re uninterested in. I studied French for like 8 years as compulsory education in school and learned virtually nothing.

There's no objective way to answer this, but one of my linguistics professors in college who was an expert in the [Salishan languages](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salishan_languages) of the Pacific Northwest of the United States and Canada felt that Salishan languages were about as different from English as you can get. The sounds are completely different, the words are composed differently, and the syntax is nothing like English. They're so different that he claimed [generative grammar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_grammar), the generic syntax theory you learn in linguistics programs, doesn't even work for some Salish languages. He had to use different systems that didn't work as well with pre-AI computers.

Any clicking language. Vietnamese feels like the hardest language to speak; 6 tones to Mandarin's 4 with harder grammar, but uses Latin. However, with both of those languages I can generally make out words and sentences.

Big Nambas

I've heard Korean is quite hard, though honestly any East Asian language is probably up there. I'd imagine some languages native to the Americas and such would also be hard, though I don't know nearly as much as I should about those

I would say hardest would be Korean. Completely weird vowels. When I hear them speak, I only hear alot of “b” vowels. Characters that are different from chinese; compared to Japanese where they share chinese characters which I am very familiar with. Even my native Chinese friend said that Korean is horrifying to pick up lol Easiest on the other hand is Malay. For those of you who have not heard of this language, try looking it up. Same structure as english and so many words adopted from english. Even used english alphabets lol. Like literally, their words are romanized and they don’t have their own alphabets and you read what you see. Like in English, Island and Honest etc are silent but in Malay, if Island was a word, you would read it as IS-LA-N-D.

Linguistically speaking, there are thousands of languages that are all equally far away from English. The greatest challenge when learning is not necessarily related to the language itself, but the availability of resources to learn from. For example, Japanese is known for being difficult to learn, but there are so many resources for learning Japanese, which will make it much easier to learn than, say, Evenki.

As a native English and Cantonese speaker, I think this one deserves a spot on the list.

As a Brit, the idea of Mandarin and Cantonese scares me or indeed any tonal language. I did learn Japanese to a very basic level once - I had about 100 kanji only - and the existence of the two phonetic alphabets makes it less daunting to get started. The pronunciation also isn’t that difficult to understand and make understandable when you’re beginning, and at least you don’t have to worry about tonal errors!

I think Burmese or Thai fits the bill. They are both abugidas, the grammar is pretty different, the pronunciations (especially in Thai) are super weird compared to English. The spelling rules in both languages are just... eugh..

Hungarian would be challenging for an english speaker I suppose

Anything with a different character set, bonus points if it isn't read left-to-right. Toughest I've attempted to date is Hebrew, which was super-difficult for me, but I haven't attempted any of the major Asian languages or Arabic.

Any language that isn't Indo European or uses the Latin alphabet. I had Mandarin in school. It was a bloody nightmare, although it's an interesting language for sure

Hard to tell but probably a language that not only has a completely unrelated vocabulary but also follows entirely different paradigms than English, or any language related to English. Of all languages that come to my mind, two candidates are \- Diné Bizaad (a.k.a. Navajo) - highly agglutinative, tonal, expresses everything with verbs (nouns are rare and adjectives don't exist), verbs are classified according to the shape of the object they refer to, instead of grammatical gender it has degrees of animatedness, and so on. \- Sumerian - also agglutinative, went extinct long before even the ancestors of English existed, has its own unique writing system, the pronunciation of the glyphs can only be inferred, follows the ergative/absolutive pattern (but not always), has lots of cases and also an otherwise weird grammar, and the vocabulary is not related to any other known language. What makes it even harder to learn these languages is the limited availability of resources. But I guess if you want to hear languages that are truly alien to an English native speaker, you'd have to go to Papua-New Guinea.

Southeast Asian languages in general are completely unrelated to English and present a lot of challenges from syntax to pronunciation and everything in between. I know some native Vietnamese speakers who have been here for twenty years and even today you can barely understand them; the pronunciation is just too different.

Arabic

I’d say Mandarin over Japanese. Tones, writing system, simpler grammar, much fewer English loan words than Japanese.

From a grammatical standpoint, probably languages with a highly inflectional morphology — that is, languages which use lots of prefixes/suffixes on top of root forms to build meaning like Korean, Japanese, and for a really fun one Inuktitut. These languages generally convey things which we use different forms of words for as a single one with additional information, eg. *drink drank drunk will drink* as *drink drink-past drink-already drink-later* ("drink" has stopped looking like a real word to me at this point), which you could alternatively think of in English as *always* saying "drink/ing, drinked, drinkeded" for "drink, drank, drunk." As you can imagine then, if you're used to *taag taa-gir taa-sung taa-beig* - note, 'Examplish' - then learning a language where the equivalents could vary from that (see: cook, cooked) to *taag tig tug teig* (see: sing sang sung) to *taag taagang hangir geengir* (see: am, are, is, was) without any clear pattern could be super difficult. You'll often hear verb tense being one of the things learners make mistakes with. Additionally, our nouns do not all pluralize the same and our pronouns but *only* our pronouns retain noun case — and on the topic of pronouns many languages don't have gendered pronouns at all, regardless of (grammatical) person. If you have *yot, yanük, ganëk* - again, Examplish - in all positions and applications, whether *ba'ïn-gaar yot urbayag murïn-gan yanük* "[the] red ball I threw [to] your brother" or *ba'ïn-gaar murïn-gan yanük urbayag yot* "[the] red ball your brother threw [to] me", *karin-gat ma'ügri ganëk* "the apple was eaten by him" or *karinya-gat durgaa ni-hiran ma'ügri ganëk* "she really doesn't like apples", then having to learn how "I/me he/him she/her they/them we/us" work or to get used to having "he, she," and "they" at all could also be very difficult. Finally, do-support ("do" as an auxiliary) and articles — I not know vs I *do* not know, apple vs *a/an* apple and *the* apple, these are a huge pain to learners. I think these are fairly self explanatory, with the question in the learner's mind probably being less "how do I make this unfamiliar distinction" and more "where and how do I insert these seemingly random words?" I can only imagine this is *incredibly* frustrating.

Pronunciation, cantonese. More tones than mandarin and English uses tones to add meaning to different words while tonal languages need those tones to differentiate words. So it's not just learning the words, it's learning how to not use tone to modify your implication. Written, probably Japanese for having 2 sylabaries and one logograph. Plus having written being so different from spoken language Grammar, probably one of the languages that use rank nouns based on animacy like the north American languages

Try speaking a native American language like Inuit, Yupik, or Navajo. You have agglutinative languages with no connection to European languages and sound unfamiliar to European language speakers. At least with Japanese or Hebrew or Arabic, you have resources. Many native indigenous languages don't have any media to help reinforce the language.

Finnish is proof aliens visited and left their language.

https://2009-2017.state.gov/m/fsi/sls/orgoverview/languages/

Georgian

Probably a signed language

English has adopted words and even grammar from most languages on earth. At this point the ones furthest from English are the ones that are series of pops and clicks.

Arabic, and most Asian language

Languages like Chinese or Navajo are often considered furthest from English due to major differences in grammar, sounds, and writing systems.

One of the Khoisan languages, presumably.

Definitely mandarin, I suffered a lot

North-east Asian languages maybe because they are exact half planet away from England 😂 Also I'm living in Korea