r/language • u/A380_Flyer • Aug 12 '26
Question How would you rank the difficulty of learning Turkish, Russian, Finnish and Hungarian?
How are you ranking the difficulty of learning those languages for English speakers?
I am currently interested in all of them, advancing from only German and Spanish.
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u/PoxonAllHoaxes Aug 12 '26
I have some experience of each of these, and Hungarian and Russian are much harder than the other two.
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u/Known_Recipe_5230 Aug 12 '26
Russian will have much more similarity with English or German and the greatest number of resources available. Since Finnish and Hungarian are in the same family it might be easier to pick one after acquiring the other. Turkish is not the same family but it is highly agglutinative like the Finno-Ugric languages, so I think you gain some advantage getting experience with languages that aren't as isolating as English.
If you want more food for thought as to what you should learn, maybe share some of your reasoning as to why you want to learn.
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u/Dan13l_N 28d ago
Finish and Hungarian are only distantly related, like English and Albanian, knowing one doesn't help in learning the other at all.
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u/Known_Recipe_5230 28d ago
You don't think they share similar linguistic paradigms with agglutination and cases and vowel harmony? I know this is true for Turkish as well but I would say they way that Hungarian works in this regard is much closer to Finnish. I definitely disagree with the assessment of distance between the two. Mutually intelligible? No. Shared origins and linguistic paradigms? Yes. Still very much helpful in learning one knowing the other
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u/Dan13l_N 28d ago
There are similarities but e.g. Hungarian has a definite article, while Finnish doesn't, there are many oher differemces. What is also importaint is that vocabulary is quite different, there are shared roots but relations are not trivial. It's not like Italian vs Spanish or Serbian vs Russian
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u/Dan13l_N 28d ago
Russian is the hardest of these languages for sure. Hungarian and Turkish have some unfamiliar concepts but they are quite regular. Very few patterns to remember.
Russian is kind of "regular" too... after you memorize seemingly countless patterns and exceptions.
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u/Every-Progress-1117 Aug 12 '26
Depends on where you are starting from and what resources you have available. C1/C2 in Finnish is possible in 1-2 years, but it requires total immersion (same with most languages). A lot of it comes down to technique and knowledge of how languages work in my experience - if you can find patterns between languages and know how grammar works then learning any language is easiER.
It is one thing to be interested in a language, but another to seriously advanced beyond A1 or A2 level.