Hungarian, the Most Difficult Language for English Speakers

Hungarian is the most difficult language for a native English speaker among languages using the same (that is, Latin) alphabet.

That is the gist of an article published on the website of CNN and spotted by the Hungarian news site index.hu. "If you like a challenge, try Hungarian. It's like no other European language you've heard, except maybe Basque," the author says.

Based on a comparison contained in the article, a native English speaker needs about 600 hours to learn Dutch, Norwegian, or the best-known Latin languages ​​(Italian, Spanish, French). German is a somewhat harder nut to crack (750 hours), but even exotic Malay or Swahili (900 hours) is simpler to learn than Hungarian (1,100 hours), which means it takes the same amount of time for an Englishman to learn as Greek or Russian, though these languages use non-Latin characters.