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Difficulty of different languages

lpetrich

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It's hard to find estimates of the difficulty of learning different (natural) languages, especially if one's first language is not English.

But the Foreign Service Institute of the US State Department once composed a list of languages with difficulty levels for the proficiency that they aim at, and I will summarize that list (source: Wikibooks:Language Learning Difficulty for English Speakers - Wikibooks, open books for an open world)

Category I: 23-24 weeks (575-600 class hours)
All Romance languages, all Germanic languages except English (0), German (I+), and Icelandic (II)

Category I+: 30 weeks (750 class hours)
German

Category I++: 36 weeks (900 class hours)
Indonesian, Javanese, Jumieka, Malay, Swahili

Category II: 44 weeks (1100 class hours)
Every language not in the other categories. Some of those listed require more time than this, and they may deserve a category of their own, Category II+.

Category III: 88 weeks (2200 class hours)
Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean
Japanese is more difficult than the others.

I'll now consider what might contribute to these difficulties. Indonesian and Swahili one might expect to be type II languages, but they are somewhat easier. Very regular grammar? Chinese, Japanese, and Korean have plenty of Chinese characters, Korean also has an alphabet, and Japanese also two syllabaries. I can't see why Arabic isn't II or II+.

As to classical languages, I'd expect Latin, Classical Greek, and maybe also Sanskrit to be II or II+ (what Finnish and Hungarian are).


I've had zero success in finding similar lists for native speakers of languages other than English, though I'm sure that some people may have made some such lists. Like the Soviet KGB and its Russian successors (domestic: FSB, foreign: SVR).
 
Category III: 88 weeks (2200 class hours)
Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean
Japanese is more difficult than the others.
Not in the opinion of St Francis Xavier who reported in 1552 following a visit to Japan, that
Japan is a very large empire entirely composed of islands. One language is spoken throughout, not very difficult to learn.​
 
Not in the opinion of St Francis Xavier who reported in 1552 following a visit to Japan, that
Japan is a very large empire entirely composed of islands. One language is spoken throughout, not very difficult to learn.​
Did he try to learn Japanese writing? That's reportedly very difficult.
 
Japanese writing is difficult, or rather the Kaniji are. Katakana and hiragana are quite simple to learn. The spoken language itself is no too difficult as the Japanese do not place the importance of word order (subject/verb) that other languages do, though they do place an importance on formal versus informal. Also, pronunciation is a snap once you learn the hiragana.
 
Japanese writing is difficult, or rather the Kaniji are. Katakana and hiragana are quite simple to learn. The spoken language itself is no too difficult as the Japanese do not place the importance of word order (subject/verb) that other languages do, though they do place an importance on formal versus informal. Also, pronunciation is a snap once you learn the hiragana.
Yes. I've found another assessment by Xavier of the difficulty of learning the Japanese language here.

In 1549, the first Christian missionaries arrived in Nagasaki. They were led by the illustrious Jesuit, Francis Xavier, later to be declared a saint. The authorities followed Saint Francis’s movements closely. By fulltime application he quickly acquired a working knowledge of the Japanese language, which he described, because of its difficulty, as “a contrivance of a conciliabulum of devils."​

One presumes the "not very difficult" refers to the spoken language, while the devils are responsible for the written script.
 
I'll now consider what might contribute to these difficulties.

Tonal languages are difficult for non-native speakers. I can learn dozens of new English words in a day, but if I try to do so with Mandarin words, the next day I remember only the pronunciations and none of the tones.
 
Tonal languages are difficult for non-native speakers. I can learn dozens of new English words in a day, but if I try to do so with Mandarin words, the next day I remember only the pronunciations and none of the tones.
I heard of a lady who knew the Chinese words well enough, but didn't have the tones right, so when she was in Beijing and asked a passerby where the nearest Internet cafe was, she was in fact calling that person a son of a turtle. This caused some confusion.
 
Arabic can't be too hard. Lots of illiterate little kids speak it.
That astounded me in France. I went there while I was in school studying that language with great toil and trouble, and here in Paris there's innumerable kids babbling happily in that tongue.
 
"Is it difficult to get to Istanbul?

"That depends on where you start from."

-------------

Is it difficult to learn another language?"

That depends on what your first language is."

-----------

As for pronunciation and tone being different -- tone is an integral part of the pronunciation*!


ETA, in languages like Mandarin or Ibo, but not in English or Spanish.
 
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As for pronunciation and tone being different -- tone is an integral part of the pronunciation*!

ETA, in languages like Mandarin or Ibo, but not in English or Spanish.

It depends whose definition you use. I see pronunciation and tone considered separate in some texts.
 
I think there are many aspects to learning another language, including reading and writing, pronunciation, listening, and grammar. All four of these are quite difficult with Japanese, with the possible exception of pronunciation - but i think the pronunciation is more difficult than many beginners believe. For example, pitch accent takes a while to master.

Chinese is mostly difficult due to pronunciation and reading and writing of the kanji characters. Pronunciation of Cantonese is more difficult than that of Mandarin, although not by much. Grammar is much, much easier than Japanese as there is less emphasis on politeness levels and word order, and verbs and adjectives do not conjugate. Adding to the difficulty, both Mandarin and Cantonese use measure words, as does Japanese.

The romance languages of Spanish, French and Italian are ****much**** easier to learn, the main difficulties being verb conjugations and a bit of pronunciation, especially for the French. I would say that it would be easier to become fluent in all three (Spanish, French and Italian) than it would to become fluent in Japanese.

All of this assumes the student is a native English speaker.
 
Arabic can't be too hard. Lots of illiterate little kids speak it.
That astounded me in France. I went there while I was in school studying that language with great toil and trouble, and here in Paris there's innumerable kids babbling happily in that tongue.
The same can be said of *any* language. First-language learners easily pick up features that cause second-language learners to stumble.
 
The same can be said of *any* language. First-language learners easily pick up features that cause second-language learners to stumble.
Yes, I know. French, Arabic, Japanese; doesn't matter - all the same in that respect.

Notice, however, that there's no "first written language" instinct, presumably because writing is very recent on an evolutionary timescale.
 
I think French is easier than German and say that as one who speaks neither (but more German than French). Dutch can't be too hard. I am fluent in only two languages, English and American.
 
Chinese is hard.

I speak it every day and still I don't actually know what the correct tone is supposed to be for a lot of words, I just try to feel it. Which works fine in general and I usually get it right but when I make a mistake I can't easily figure out what the right way to say a word is. I remember one time I was met my girlfriend in the subway and I made a joke saying "you look very familiar" only I pronounced it as "you look very skinny".

Reading is even harder than speaking, and writing is even harder. Texting is okay, you just have to know the pinyin and be able to recognise the word, but ask me to actually hand-write something and, well, I've forgotten how to actually write all the words I originally learned.
 
Greek is a bitch. It's inflected to death. Even place names have gender and number, so it's "The (feminine singular) Athens" while our village is neuter plural. Possessive forms are sometimes double-possessive, so "Dimitri's house" becomes something like "The house of Dimitri's", only worse.

Pretty often my mental shutters just block it all out and I decide to bodge along as usual :)
 
So according to the OP, English and Greek would both be in category II?

I'd put Latin in the easiest category, even with all its declensions and conjugations. It just seems so logical. But that may be because of the teacher I had. For one thing, her favorite saying was, "Never mind if it's a stupid question. Ask it anyway! Someone else will want to know."
 
So according to the OP, English and Greek would both be in category II?
That list was designed for English speakers, so English would be in category 0 in it, the speaker's native language.

Modern Greek is II in it, and Classical Greek has more complicated morphology, so it's likely II or II+.

I'd put Latin in the easiest category, even with all its declensions and conjugations. It just seems so logical. But that may be because of the teacher I had. For one thing, her favorite saying was, "Never mind if it's a stupid question. Ask it anyway! Someone else will want to know."
Interesting issue. How might teaching other languages work out if taught in that way?

Even if you found it easy, it may still have required a lot of work. Latin word order is much more free than in English, for instance:
What Is the Latin Word Order?
Latin Word Order « Cogitatorium
This includes splitting up noun phrases.

The first one contains this sentence from Virgin's Aeneid (4.139):
Aurea purpuream subnectit fibula vestem
Golden purple ties brooch garment
A golden brooch ties the purple garment

BTW, I once composed some Latin to make fun of someone I considered very illogical. After she quoted a Latin version of the Bible, I came up with:

[Locus allatus immutatus deletus] O JoanieCarissima, tu puella mala! Pudeat tui!
Oh, vexaveruntne te, JoanieCarissima?
Ex scriptis altris, JoanieCarissima lunatica
JoanieCarissimam litterarum illarum nihil intellegere credo
O JoanieCarissima, aut testimonium exhibe aut tu obtrectatrix!
Arcete pueros ab JoanieCarissima!!!
Vexavitne Billus Imperator JoanieCarissimam? Vexavitne JoanieCarissima Billum Imperatorem?
JoanieCarissima Rhondam Rubinam Martinam Umlauftamque verae mulieres non esse credit
JoanieCarissima, ille tauristercus purus
 
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That happens in French too. Most countries are feminine but some are masculine, and that means different prepositions as well.
German has an even wider choice of prepositions when you want to express where you go to. If a country name has an article, you use in, e.g.
"Wir fahren in die Schweiz" (Switzerland)
and otherwise you use nach, e.g.
"Wir fahren nach Österreich" (Austria)
with one single exception: Wir fahren gegen Engeland. :boxedin:

For non-geographical locations, it's zu, e.g., "Wir fahren zum Bahnhof" (train station), except when it's an, e.g., "Wir fahren an den Strand" (the beach). See this page for many more examples.
 
Most linguists say that most languages are of rougly equal difficulty if learned as a "Cradle Language" ...the first language you learn as a baby...but some of defienently more difficult to learn then others as a second language.
Tonal languages...where the same word can mean different things if pronounced in a different tone...are particulary difficult as a second language.
And, of course, you have "reading knowledge"...where somebody can read a language pretty well but does not speak it very well in verbal communication. I can read Spanish OK, but have problems can communicate with Spanish speakers very well.
 
Most linguists say that most languages are of rougly equal difficulty if learned as a "Cradle Language" ...the first language you learn as a baby...but some of defienently more difficult to learn then others as a second language.
Tonal languages...where the same word can mean different things if pronounced in a different tone...are particulary difficult as a second language.
And, of course, you have "reading knowledge"...where somebody can read a language pretty well but does not speak it very well in verbal communication. I can read Spanish OK, but have problems can communicate with Spanish speakers very well.

The term used by linguists for the first language a person acquires is "first language" (sometimes L1 or even "native language"), and it is usually distinguished with "second language" or L2. The acquisition process of the L1 is sometimes also distinguished with L2 with the former being something of an unconscious process. When it comes to speaking the language there usually has to be some pathology involves if a child cannot learn their L1. Learning an L2 may be more difficult depending on the L1. Japanese speakers will find learning English more difficult than Dutch or Spanish people will because there is less useful grammatical transference or cognates.

Written language is a whole nother ballgame in which some languages will be more or less difficult even for L1 learners.

And of course all language learners are likely to have higher receptive skills than productive skills. This is true even in our own language when we are able to listen and understand a very good public speaker or admire a good writer even though we aren't capable of the same facility with the language.
 
So, Esperanto is like what, 50 hours? 100 hours?

I spent a year learning Esperanto on my own, and 4 years learning Spanish in school. My spoken and received Spanish is pretty hopeless, but I'm still quite capable with Esperanto :)

The major advantage I had when learning Esperanto wasn't the simplicity of the language, but that everyone who learns Esperanto acquires it as a second or third language during adulthood. The community taught me how to learn a foreign language (some of the advice I received is reflected here), making Esperanto a stepping stone to learning virtually any other language in the future.
 
The term used by linguists for the first language a person acquires is "first language" (sometimes L1 or even "native language"), and it is usually distinguished with "second language" or L2. The acquisition process of the L1 is sometimes also distinguished with L2 with the former being something of an unconscious process. When it comes to speaking the language there usually has to be some pathology involves if a child cannot learn their L1.
Even stronger, during the L1 acquisition process the parts of the brain responsible for language are wired. Which also means it's important to learn your mother language as an infant, as the capability of the brain to (re)wire greatly diminishes later in life.

Learning an L2 may be more difficult depending on the L1. Japanese speakers will find learning English more difficult than Dutch or Spanish people will because there is less useful grammatical transference or cognates.
Another aspect about the difficulty to learn a specific L2 is the sounds used in the language. As an infant, you learn to discriminate sounds that are considered different in your L1. If a specific L2 has two sounds that it considers different but your L1 does not, you have a problem learning that difference.
 
Polyglots have always interested me, although I've only ever met someone who maxed out at five languages.

This guy is cool: http://www.foreignlanguageexpertise.com/about.html (scroll down for language list).

And this one:
"A more recent example of a hyper-polyglot is one Emil Krebs, who spoke a reported 65 different languages. Fun fact, Krebs took great enjoyment in the fact that he could translate the phrase “kiss my ass” into 40 different languages. When told that it’d be impossible to learn every language on Earth, Krebs asked which language would be the hardest to learn and mastered the hell out of that on principle. If you’re curious, the language Krebs eventually settled on as the hardest was Chinese."
 
I used to know a man who spoke over 30 languages, although none of them well. He would add another one every year, and his technique was to read "Little Prince" in a new language. When I went to Kazakhstan on a business trip, he asked me to bring him "Little Prince" in Kazakh.
 
Y'all gotta remember that learning a tonal language can be extremely difficult for those of us who don't speak one. My wife has more trouble with English than she does with Cantonese! Because she spoke two tonal languages (Thai and Issan) before she learned Cantonese. And if you ask Mandarin speakers (the language listed most often as the most difficult to learn), even they don't want to deal with Cantonese because the additional tones drive them crazy.

Plus, you have to distinguish between speaking, speaking rather fluently, and read/write. I know a lot of people who cover the first two; very few who can do the reading/writing, though.

Naturally the languages that use different characters and even phonetic alphabets (with all letters different to ours) are going to require a whole new level of learning/time when you can't sound them out. Thai has a phonetic alphabet, but the characters are so foreign to us that westerners who say they are fluent in Thai just about never mean they can read/write it. Naturally, if you include "read/write" the languages with a zillion characters are going to be the hardest, particularly because the different styles of those characters of their history can look as different as night and day. The simplified vs traditional Chinese characters look relatively similar to my western eyes, but only insofar as I can say, "yeah, I can see how this is a simplification of that". To a Chinese person, though, I know many who cannot read Traditional, at all. I think it's because I look at the whole character as a picture and they look at the individual strokes. The devil in the detail, as it were.
 
Thai has a phonetic alphabet, but the characters are so foreign to us that westerners who say they are fluent in Thai just about never mean they can read/write it.
With a bunch of languages from India to eastern Europe, I'm the opposite: I've learned to sound out words based on how they're spelled in various alphabets, but would usually have no idea what word I just said if someone didn't translate it for me. It's a side effect of having read a lot about the evolution of the Phoenician alphabet and its descendants and then gotten involved in a project that involves comparing words for the same things in different languages to find out if they've been transferred from one language to another.

Hindi and Urdu are a fun one. In speech, they're practically the same language, but Urdu uses the Arabic alphabet with just a few additions, and Hindi uses the Devanāgarī alphabet, which is more tailored to the sounds of languages in this family. As a result, while there's normally no doubt about a Hindi word's pronunciation, Urdu words literally never contain all the information you would need to derive a pronunciation from what you see. It doesn't distinguish between "o" and "u", or between "e" and "i", or among four different nasals that it represents with the equivalent of "n" (plain "n", two more that we would recognize as "ng" and "ñ", and one that's like an "n" trying to impersonate an "r"), or between the consonant-like and vowel-like behaviors of its letters equivalent to our "y", "w", "r", and "L". On top of that, vowel length makes a difference in the spoken language (different words can be distinguished based on how long or short a vowel is), but the Urdu alphabet's way of distinguishing between them is... to just not write short ones at all, so there's literally no indication of whether two written sounds have a short vowel between them. You just need to fill in the blanks from other sources of information, for every single written word. This goes beyond an alphabet being hard for foreigners to learn; it's not very good even for serving the purposes of its own spoken language's native speakers. The Devanāgarī system is so much cleaner and more directly applicable, with a place for everything and everything in its place, that there's no way anybody could ever think it makes more sense to use the Urdu system instead, in any practical sense. It only sticks around because of politics and religion.

Naturally, if you include "read/write" the languages with a zillion characters are going to be the hardest
Yes, but some phonetic systems are easier or harder than others.

First, a syllable-based one is more troublesome than an individual-sound-based one. This is not only because there are bound to be a lot more syllables than individual sounds, but also because even with all of those symbols they still end up with a system that doesn't acknowledge some sound-sequences in the spoken language. (I don't know of any reason why they couldn't, but in known systems, they don't.)

But that doesn't mean I'm saying that having a bunch more symbols is necessarily bad. Devanāgarī can be said to have hundreds (and even a syllabic structure), but that's only by doing one or both of two things:
  1. Counting the same letter as multiple separate symbols just because of different diacritical marks (the kinds of things that make "c" different from "ć/ĉ/č/ç/ċ/ɕ"), which isn't fair because those diacritics are just vowels and do exactly the same thing on every consonant just as if they were written as separate letters in line with the consonants;
  2. Counting consonant ligatures (symbols made from two or more letters apiece), which isn't fair because they only represent the sounds of their constituent letters pronounced consecutively and are easy to recognize as the groups of separate consecutive consonants that they are because the symbols are formed in a predictable way that leaves the original components visible.
So what it really has is a few dozen symbols, just like a large alphabet, not hundreds like a syllabic system.

And among alphabets, not syllabic systems, there's still another distinction to make, based on how they handle vowel sounds. In India and Greece, systems were developed to explicitly mark every vowel sound. In one, they're always separate letters (which was inherited from Greek into the Latin, Cyrillic, and runic/Futhark systems), and in the other, they're usually diacritics applied to the consonants, but either way, at least they're always there.

The Phoenician alphabet just ignored vowel sounds, and this has never really been consistently fixed in Semitic languages since then, making Semitic languages' alphabets the hardest ones to use. Three of the "consonants" have taken on dual use as vowels, but there's still no general way to tell whether any of them is used as a vowel or as a consonant when you're reading, or whether to include them or omit them when you're writing. Syriac seems to have done nothing about this situation at all, and the diacritical systems that could handle it for Hebrew and Arabic haven't caught on and aren't always used.
 
. . . but Urdu uses the Arabic alphabet with just a few additions, and Hindi uses the Devanāgarī alphabet, . . . . On top of that, vowel length makes a difference in the spoken language (different words can be distinguished based on how long or short a vowel is), but the Urdu alphabet's way of distinguishing between them is... to just not write short ones at all, so there's literally no indication of whether two written sounds have a short vowel between them. You just need to fill in the blanks from other sources of information, for every single written word. This goes beyond an alphabet being hard for foreigners to learn . . .

Yep, that's one of my big annoyances about trying to read Arabic, the "invisible vowels" as I call them. They tend to only be written in religious writing and important documents, otherwise you just have to know what the word is to know what short vowels there are. 'Mohammed' is a great example as in Arabic it's written 'mhmd' and 'Mahmoud' is written 'mhmud' (and on top of that Arabic is written right-to-left, so to beginners not used to that it looks like 'dmhm' and 'dumhm').

Heck, it's even possible that there isn't a vowel between two consonants, you just gotta know.
 
I understand that Hebrew is similiar to Arabic in the way it handles vowels.
I think - and would be grateful to be corrected if I'm wrong - that's because of the structure of words in these and other Semitic languages, which is based on the consonants they contain. So writing down the vowels would be less important in early Phonician than it was in, for example, Greek. On adopting "Punic" letters, the Greeks turned some of them from consonants into vowels, to accommodate the different characteristics of their own language. Wiki states that:

The Semitic languages are notable for their nonconcatenative morphology. That is, word roots are not themselves syllables or words, but instead are isolated sets of consonants (usually three, making a so-called triliteral root). Words are composed out of roots not so much by adding prefixes or suffixes, but rather by filling in the vowels between the root consonants (although prefixes and suffixes are often added as well). For example, in Arabic, the root meaning "write" has the form k-t-b. From this root, words are formed by filling in the vowels and sometimes adding additional consonants, e.g. kitāb "book", kutub "books", kātib "writer", kuttāb "writers", kataba "he wrote", yaktubu "he writes", etc.​

So, I suppose that even without the vowels, the general meaning of the word will be clear, and context can supply the unwritten vowels, to a reader familiar with the language.
 
I think one can use Yod, Aleph, Waw and He to indicate vowels in Hebrew (and presumably Phoenician) when it isn't obvious. Hence why the Greeks turned them into Iota, Alpha, Ypsilon and Eta.
 
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