Ask five language learners which language is hardest and you'll get five confident, mostly vague answers, usually a general impression rather than a reason. It's worth answering properly, because the honest answer differs depending on whether you mean hardest to speak fluently, hardest to read, or hardest overall, and reading specifically has its own distinct difficulty ranking, not identical to general language difficulty.
What "hardest" actually measures here
Overall difficulty rankings, most visibly the U.S. Foreign Service Institute's category system, which trains American diplomats and groups languages by roughly how many classroom hours reaching professional proficiency tends to take, measure speaking and listening proficiency as much as reading. Reading difficulty specifically depends on a narrower set of factors: how transparent the spelling-to-sound relationship is, how much the grammar marks meaning through word endings you have to track rather than word order alone, and how far the vocabulary and sentence structure diverge from English.
Where French, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese actually sit
These four sit in the FSI's easiest category for English speakers, with a commonly cited figure around 575 to 600 hours to reach professional proficiency, and for reading specifically, they're genuinely closer to each other than to German or Hungarian. All four use the Latin alphabet with reasonably learnable spelling rules, share substantial vocabulary overlap with English through shared Latin roots, and largely follow subject-verb-object word order close enough to English that sentence structure rarely requires fundamentally rethinking how you parse a sentence.
Within this group, Spanish and Italian tend to be considered the most transparent for reading specifically, because their spelling maps to pronunciation with relatively few silent letters or irregular patterns. French reading is complicated by a genuinely large gap between spelling and pronunciation, silent letters, liaison, multiple spellings for the same sound, though this affects listening and speaking far more than pure reading comprehension, since the spelling itself, once learned, is fairly consistent even if it doesn't sound the way it looks. Portuguese sits close to Spanish for reading, with the caveat that European Portuguese's heavy unstressed-vowel reduction in speech doesn't affect the written form at all, so reading difficulty here is genuinely lower than listening difficulty would suggest.
Why German is a real step up specifically for reading
German sits one FSI category above the four Romance languages, and for reading specifically, the reason is structural rather than about vocabulary or spelling. German marks grammatical relationships, who's doing what to whom, through case endings on articles and adjectives rather than relying mainly on word order the way English and the Romance languages do. This means word order can shift in ways that look scrambled to an English-trained eye without actually changing who's the subject and who's the object, and correctly parsing a sentence requires tracking case markers rather than position alone.
Verb-final subordinate clauses add a second real gap: in a clause introduced by weil or dass, the conjugated verb moves to the very end, sometimes many words after the clause begins, which forces you to hold the clause open in working memory until the verb finally tells you what's actually happening. Compound nouns are a more forgiving difficulty by comparison, since they're usually decomposable into recognizable smaller words once you know to look for the seams, unlike the case system and clause structure, which require genuinely different sentence-parsing habits than English trains.
Why Hungarian is a different kind of hard, not just a harder version of German
Hungarian sits in the FSI's hardest category alongside languages like Finnish and Arabic, and it's worth being specific about why, because it isn't simply "German's difficulty, but more." Hungarian is not an Indo-European language at all, so it shares essentially no vocabulary roots with English, removing the cognate head start that helps even with German. Its grammar builds meaning through an extensive system of suffixes rather than prepositions or word order, a single Hungarian word can carry what would take a short phrase in English, and vowel harmony changes how those suffixes are spelled depending on the vowels already in the word, so the same grammatical suffix shows up spelled differently from word to word, which breaks the simplest fallback strategy other languages allow: looking up an unfamiliar word by its dictionary form.
This is the real reason Hungarian reads as categorically harder for reading specifically, not just for classroom hours overall. French, German, and even Hungarian's fellow hard-category languages that are at least Indo-European give you some structural or lexical foothold to build from. Hungarian, structurally, gives you almost none, which is why a strategy that works for closing the gap in German, like learning to track case endings or scan for a verb-final clause, doesn't transfer to Hungarian at all; the whole approach to parsing a sentence has to be rebuilt from different assumptions.
A quick side-by-side
Concretely: a French, Spanish, Italian, or Portuguese learner reading a news sentence can usually lean on cognate vocabulary and familiar word order even when a specific word is unknown, guessing correctly a meaningful share of the time. A German learner facing an unfamiliar word has less of that lexical safety net, since German vocabulary diverges from English far more than Romance vocabulary does, but can still usually identify the sentence's grammatical roles correctly by tracking case endings once that skill is built, even with gaps in vocabulary. A Hungarian learner facing an unfamiliar word often has neither: no reliable cognate to guess from, and a suffix system that can bury the grammatical role of a word inside spelling that shifts with vowel harmony, which is why starting Hungarian well means expecting a genuinely different kind of early struggle than a French or Spanish learner would recognize, one where the usual beginner instincts, guess from a familiar root, guess from position in the sentence, both fail more often than they succeed.
What this actually means for choosing where to start
None of this is a reason to avoid German or Hungarian, and difficulty here describes typical time and effort, not whether reading comfort is achievable. It's a reason to set expectations honestly: real reading comfort in French, Spanish, Italian, or Portuguese tends to arrive faster and with fewer structural surprises than in German, and German in turn arrives with fewer surprises than Hungarian, which asks a learner to build pattern-recognition skills from close to zero rather than adapting skills that transfer from English or from another Romance language already known.