What's considered the hardest languages to learn?

Chinese is one of the most difficult languages for native English speakers to learn due to a combination of factors. There are few similarities between English and Chinese due to their distinct writing systems, grammatical structures, and pronunciation styles.

To become fluent in Chinese, one needs to put in years of study, and even then, it is uncommon to obtain native-like ability. Typically, in order to be deemed fluent enough to read the morning newspaper, one needs to master 3,000 characters. The language's tens of thousands of characters make achieving ultimate proficiency a difficult endeavor. 

The fact that the written forms of Chinese words give no clues on the pronunciation and therefore must be learned separately further complicates the situation. Given that over 67% of words contain two or more characters, one can see how it earns the title of one of the hardest languages to learn. 

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