The Georgian language was named one of the four hardest languages to learn for a foreigner along with Persian, Turkish and Icelandic.

Georgian one of the four hardest languages to learn.

Georgian sounds like it should be an American English dialect spoken in the Coca-Cola Headquarters in Atlanta not a mystic ancient language from the Caucasus written with an elven like script.

Why Is Georgian Hard to Learn?

According to Thomas Wier, Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the Free University of Tbilisi, two things stand out. “The language itself has features that few languages around the world have. Compounding the problem is the fact that the context in which you learn the language (the resources available, and the attitude Georgians take towards foreigners speaking their language), means that foreigners have an uphill struggle even if the language itself were not unusual.”



Here is another link: Why is Georgian so hard to learn?

Georgian (ქართული ენა) is part of the Kartvelian language family, connected to other languages spoken in the region like Laz and Svan but not a part of the family of Indo-European tongues or even the neighbouring Turkic languages.

Any foreign vocabulary you’ve ever picked up in the past is useless for learning Georgian apart from maybe Persian, there are many Persian loanwords in Georgian like panjara (ფანჯარა): window. By contrast a quarter of the English language is from French, making French an easier language to learn for an English-speaker . The daunting foreign vocabulary is not all, the modern Georgian alphabet, Mkhedruli, is also completely unique to the language.

The Georgian alphabet is on UNESCO’s list of intangible cultural heritage assets. At first, reading Georgian is about as easy as deciphering ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. But once you’ve memorized the letters and their associated sounds, the Georgian language shines, even where modern languages like English and French fail, with its highly-phonetic script. You see a letter in a word and it will be pronounced the same way consistently, not like English where bomb, comb and tomb all have different pronunciations of the o.

consonant clusters

Professor Wier also notes that in Georgian, exorbitant consonant clusters – both quantitatively and qualitatively – are more complex than in any other language, making simple articulation of the language difficult. An extreme example is მწვრთნელი /mtsvrt’neli/ meaning “trainer” with 6 consonants in succession.

For all but the nerdiest of grammar geeks, the notoriously arcane Georgian grammar is fraught with difficulty. Learning Georgian involves coming to terms with tricky polysyllabic words like agglutination, polypersonalism, and postpositions.

How To Learn Georgian

Fortunately, it’s not all doom and gloom for Georgian learners. Georgian gives us a bit of a break with its lack of grammatical genders and missing definite and indefinite articles, avoiding the complexities that even learners of common foreign languages like German or French might struggle with.

Finding good English-language Georgian learning resources can sometimes be a challenge, it is a very small market, not many English speakers want to learn a language of little use outside its national boundaries.

As I continue with this blog, I will explore and comment on resources I find.

Update :I have just seen The Foreign Service Institute language difficulty rankings. Giving an indication of how long a native English speaker would need to reach proficiency in a number of different languages. Georgian is a category 4 language with an asterisk indicating that it is usually more difficult than other languages in the same category. They suggest 44 weeks (1100 hours) to reach proficiency. There are five level five languages (supposedly the most difficult), where they suggest 88 weeks (2200 hours) to reach proficiency; they are Arabic, Cantonese (Chinese), Mandarin (Chinese), *Japanese and Korean. Here is the link: Language Difficulty Rankings