Originally there were 35 consonant characters, but modern Khmer uses only 33. Each character represents a consonant sound together with an inherent vowel, either â or ô; in many cases, in the absence of another vowel mark, the inherent vowel is to be pronounced after the consonant.
Is Khmer hard to learn?
Khmer is a truly difficult language for Westerners to learn, harder than Mandarin to speak, and harder than anything other than Chinese or Japanese to read. … To top it off, there is no standard, intuitive system to transcribe Khmer into the Latin alphabet.
What is the hardest language to learn?
8 Hardest Languages to Learn In The World For English Speakers
- Mandarin. Number of native speakers: 1.2 billion. …
- Icelandic. Number of native speakers: 330,000. …
- Japanese. Number of native speakers: 122 million. …
- Hungarian. Number of native speakers: 13 million. …
- Korean. Number of native speakers: 66.3 million. …
- Arabic. …
- Finnish. …
- Polish.