The hardest words to pronounce in 4 languages

The hardest words to pronounce in a new language are not the tongue-twisters. They are ordinary words built on a sound English does not have: Spanish trabajo, French tu, German ich, Italian gli. Each of those four is among the 150 commonest words of its language, so a learner meets the problem in the first lesson and every day after. Below are the hard words of Spanish, French, German and Italian that you will actually need, ranked by how often they are said in film and television, with what makes each one difficult.

Updated 15 October 2026 · 10 min read

The French, German and Italian lists each end with the famous hard word of that language, the one in all the videos, to show how rarely it comes up.

Spanish: the j and the rolled r

Spanish spelling is regular and its five vowels are easy. The trouble is two consonants.

• J (and g before e or i) is a rasp made at the back of the mouth, like the ch of Scottish loch. English speakers tend to say an h, which is understood, or an English j, which is not.
• R has two versions. A single r between vowels is one quick tap of the tongue. A double rr, or any r at the start of a word, is a roll of several taps. The difference changes the word: pero is "but" and perro is "dog".

9 of these 12 are among the thousand commonest words in Spanish. Trabajo and gente are each said more than 800 times per million words, so the j sound is one to get right in the first week. The roll can wait a little longer: plenty of learners take months to produce it, and a tap in its place is nearly always understood.

French: vowels English does not have

French consonants are mostly easy. The vowels are where an English speaker goes wrong, along with the letters that are written and not said.

• U as in tu is made with the tongue in the position for "ee" and the lips rounded as for "oo". It is a different vowel from ou, and the pair distinguishes words: tu is "you", tout is "all".
• Eu as in deux is another rounded vowel with no English equivalent.
• Nasal vowels, as in un, vin and bon, are vowels sent through the nose; the n is not pronounced as a consonant.
• The glide in ui, as in lui and nuit, runs the French u straight into i.
• The r is made at the back of the throat.
• Silent and misleading letters: femme is said "fam", monsieur "muh-syuh", and beaucoup ends in a silent p.

13 of these 14 are in the thousand commonest French words, and tu and un are both in the top ten. That is why French feels harder to pronounce than it is to read: the difficult sounds are in the commonest words of all. The words that are hard to hear, as opposed to say, are counted in how many words you need to watch French films.

Grenouille, "frog", is the word French teachers use to test foreigners. It is said 7.1 times per million words. Tu is said about two thousand times as often.

German: the two ch sounds, the umlauts and the clusters

German is spelt almost as it sounds, so the difficulty is purely in the mouth.

• The soft ch, as in ich and nicht, is a hiss made with the tongue near the roof of the mouth, where English starts the word "huge". It is not "ick" and not "ish". After a, o and u German uses a different, harder ch, the one in Buch and Scottish loch.
• Ü and ö are rounded front vowels, the same family as French u and eu.
• Z is "ts", even at the start of a word: zwei, zehn.
• Consonant clusters pile up at the ends of words: nichts, jetzt, Angst, Arzt.

14 of these 15 are in the thousand commonest German words. Ich is the single commonest word in German dialogue and nicht is sixth, so the soft ch is in almost every sentence a learner says. It is worth an hour of deliberate practice on the first day.

Eichhörnchen, "squirrel", is the German word in every "impossible to pronounce" video, with two soft ch sounds round an ö. It is said 5.7 times per million words. The even longer favourites of those videos mostly never appear at all; the longest German words people actually use counts which ones do.

Italian: gl, gn and double consonants

Italian is the easiest of the four to pronounce, and its hard sounds are few.

• Gl before i is a single sound, like the lli of "million" said as one movement of the tongue. It is not a g followed by an l.
• Gn is a single sound too, the ny of "canyon".
• Double consonants are held longer than single ones, and the length changes the word: anno is "year", nonno is "grandfather", and each has a single-consonant twin that means something else.
• C and g change with the next letter. Before e or i, c is "ch" and g is "j"; an h after them makes them hard again, so chi is "kee" and ghi is "ghee".

11 of these 14 are in the thousand commonest Italian words. The gl sound alone accounts for gli, voglio, meglio and famiglia, four words a beginner needs at once.

Gnocchi is the Italian word English speakers argue about. In Italian film and television it is said 1.0 times per million words: you will need gli about two thousand times as often.

What the four lists have in common

• The hard sounds are in the commonest words. Spanish trabajo, French tu, German ich and Italian gli are all in the first 150 words of their language. Difficulty in pronunciation is front-loaded, not something that arrives with advanced vocabulary.
• The famous hard words are rare. Grenouille, Eichhörnchen and gnocchi are all outside the first 7,000 words. They are fun to practise and almost never needed.
• A few sounds do nearly all the damage. Each language has two or three sounds English lacks, and they repeat. Learn the sound, not the word, and whole lists fall at once.
• Being understood comes before sounding native. A tapped r for a rolled one, or an h for the Spanish j, will get you through. Saying tout for tu, or ano for anno, says a different word.

How to practise

1. Find the sound alone first. For French u, say "ee" and round your lips without moving your tongue. For the German soft ch, whisper "huge" and hold the first sound.
2. Then put it in the commonest word that has it. Tu, ich, gli, trabajo: you will say these thousands of times, so they are the right place to practise.
3. Listen to a recording and copy it immediately, before the sound fades. Spelling is a poor guide in French and a good one in the other three.
4. Leave the tongue-twisters for later. They are a party trick.

Verbavia (our own course) teaches Spanish, French, German and Italian from the commonest words up, with recordings of every word, free on the web. Whether each language is hard beyond its sounds is weighed up in is Spanish hard to learn, is French hard to learn, is German hard to learn and is Italian hard to learn. For a language where the hard part is pitch, not consonants, see Mandarin or Cantonese: which tones are harder.

The sounds each language finds hardest are also the ones its tongue twisters are built on: see tongue twisters in different languages.

Sources

• Wikipedia: Spanish phonology (the tap and the trill; the velar fricative written j), French phonology (front rounded and nasal vowels), Standard German phonology (the ich-Laut and ach-Laut) and Italian phonology (the palatal consonants and consonant length).
• Lison, P. & Tiedemann, J. (2016). OpenSubtitles2016: Extracting Large Parallel Corpora from Movie and TV Subtitles. Proceedings of LREC 2016. aclanthology.org
• Dave, H. FrequencyWords: frequency lists from OpenSubtitles 2018, content licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. github.com. The counts and ranks are computed by scripts/frequency_reference.py and printed from its output rather than typed. Which words are on each list, and the description of what is hard about each, are our own choices.