5 languages that are hard to master, but will pay off forever

Being able to speak different languages is a coveted skill. It doesn't come easy to everyone, however.

I've observed friends and family members learning Italian, Japanese, Spanish, German, Greek, French, and Irish Gaelic.

Still, according to Gallup, only one in four Americans can hold a conversation in a language other than English.

Personally, I'm definitely not in that skilled 25% of the US population. I barely scraped through five years of basic Latin (and today, the handful words I remember mostly pertain to carriages getting stuck in ditches, thanks to the supremely weird textbook we used).

Just because learning languages can be a difficult process, doesn't mean that you should just give up. Picking up another language can open so many doors in your personal and professional life. One 2015 Quora post titled "As a person with English as my first language, what would be the most useful foreign language that I could learn?" covered this topic quite extensively.

Using Quora poster Sanda Golcea's list of the most spoken languages in the world by native speakers and number of countries, here are five languages that might be a bit trickier for English speakers to master, but are definitely worth the effort: