Difficulty in Learning another Language?

[lpetrich]

Here is the main source that I've found for difficulty of (natural) language learning for English speakers.

Foreign Language Training - United States Department of State

FSI’s Experience with Language Learning

The following language learning timelines reflect 70 years of experience in teaching languages to U.S. diplomats, and illustrate the time usually required for a student to reach “Professional Working Proficiency” in the language, or a score of “Speaking-3/Reading-3” on the Interagency Language Roundtable scale. These timelines are based on what FSI has observed as the average length of time for a student to achieve proficiency, though the actual time can vary based on a number of factors, including the language learner’s natural ability, prior linguistic experience, and time spent in the classroom.

Wikibooks:Language Learning Difficulty for English Speakers - Wikibooks, open books for an open world has an earlier version of this list.

• I (24 weeks) Afrikaans, Catalan, Danish, Dutch, Galician, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Swedish
• I' (30 weeks) French
• II (36 weeks) German, Haitian Creole, Indonesian, Malay, Swahili, Javanese, Jumieka
• III (44 weeks) (most languages)
• IV (88 weeks) Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean

Is that ranking even halfway plausible? Has anyone made any similar lists for native speakers of other languages? I can imagine the KGB and its successors doing so for speakers of Russian, but I haven't found anything on that.

 

[lpetrich]

I've seen these theories about the class-IV languages:

For Arabic, one has to learn both Modern Standard Arabic and some regional dialect.

For Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, one has to learn a large number of Chinese characters.

Without these features, these languages may be class-III instead.

As to what may make Swahili and Malay/Indonesian II instead of III I can only speculate. Highly regular grammar?

As to what makes most Romance and Germanic languages I I've seen a theory about.

•  Standard Average European
• Standard Average European
• Standard Average European: The European Sprachbund - YouTube
• Euroversals - Are all European languages alike? - YouTube

Here is a list by degree of agreement with the SAE feature list.

• 9: French, German, Occitan, Romansh
• 8: Dutch, Spanish, Italian, Sardinian, Albanian
• 7: English, Romanian, Greek
• 6: Swedish, Norwegian, Czech, Icelandic
• 5: Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Hungarian, Slovenian, Serbo-Croatian, Bulgarian, Ukrainian, Russian
• <=2: Finnish, Estonian, Irish, Gaelic, Welsh, Breton, Basque, Turkish, Georgian, Armenian

All the I, I', and II languages, along with English itself, have agreement counts of 6 to 9, However, these counts have some III languages. Counts of 5 or lower are all III, however.

This convergence most likely happened in the early Middle Ages.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I've seen these theories about the class-IV languages:

For Arabic, one has to learn both Modern Standard Arabic and some regional dialect.

For Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, one has to learn a large number of Chinese characters.

Japanese characters are not Chinese characters, although there is some correspondence. We walked into a supermarket in Japan and my wife could get about 1 in 4 things on the signs. She had no understanding of more complex written stuff and no understanding of the spoken language.

I believe Korean is also separate but we have never been there and I haven't looked into it.

 

[Worldtraveller]

I've learned both German (relatively easy) and Japanese (significantly harder) in my life, to varying degrees.

The Japanese spoken language, and the 'original' written language (Hiragana) is relatively easy. It has very straightforward pronunciation rules, and the grammar, while very different from english, is very structured, and once you understand it, it's not that bad. The difficulty lies in that the Japanese modern written language is a mish-mash of Hiragana, Katakana (used to emulate sounds not natively found in Japanese language, and some more modern usages), and Conji (Chinese). They mix all of this in their writing, which is why someone who knows Chinese Conji would have a hard time, whereas the Japanese can read Chinese readily. My understanding is that the Japanese subtly change the context/meaning of some characters, though, which doesn't make it 100% relatable.

 

[Swammerdami]

As I wrote in another thread the difference between Easy (I and II) and Hard (III and IV) is most likely that the former use alphabets close to English, while the latter don't.

If one is satisfied with conversational ease to make holidays more pleasant and doesn't try to learn written language, I still think Thai is easier than French or German.

 

[Bomb#20]

Another source of difficulty is the PRC's program of simplifying characters to promote literacy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Chinese_characters

The Chinese characters used in Japanese are based on the old forms of the characters. So it's likely to be easier for Taiwanese to read Japanese writing and vice versa than for mainlanders.

 

[lpetrich]

As I wrote in another thread the difference between Easy (I and II) and Hard (III and IV) is most likely that the former use alphabets close to English, while the latter don't.

Let's see: all the I and II languages use the Roman alphabet, and most of the III languages. Of those that don't, many of them use other alphabets and quasi-alphabets. I say quasi-alphabet to cover the Hebrew and Arabic alphabets, where vowels are an afterthought (abjads) and also South Asian ones, where one writes vowels that are other than a certain one, usually "a" (abugidas).

Some of them should be easy for Roman-alphabet users, like the Greek and Cyrillic alphabets.

Here is the complete list of III and old II langs that the State Department listed:

Albanian, Amharic, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Belarusian, Bengali, Bulgarian, Burmese, Cebuano, Czech, Dari, Dzongkha, Estonian, Farsi, Finnish, Georgian, Greek, Gujarati, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Ilocano, Irish, Kannada, Kazakh, Khmer, Kurdish, Kyrgyz, Lao, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Marathi, Mongolian, Nepali, Pashto, Polish, Punjabi, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Sinhala, Slovak, Slovenian, Somali, Tagalog, Tajiki, Tamil, Tanchangya, Telugu, Tetum, Thai, Tibetan, Turkish, Turkmen, Ukrainian, Urdu, Uzbek, Vietnamese, Xhosa, Zulu

One Germanic language is in this list of difficulty III: Icelandic. It is the most morphologically conservative of present-day Germanic languages, much like Old Norse and Old English and Gothic.

All the other IE langs are difficulty III: Celtic, Albanian, Greek, Armenian, Balto-Slavic, Indo-Iranian.

Some non-IE langs are difficulty II: Swahili and Malay/Indonesian, but nearly all of them listed are III or IV. What might make the II ones easy to learn?

If one is satisfied with conversational ease to make holidays more pleasant and doesn't try to learn written language, I still think Thai is easier than French or German.

Has anyone tried to find out?

 

[Swammerdami]

Here is the complete list of III and old II langs that the State Department listed:
...
Some non-IE langs are difficulty II: Swahili and Malay/Indonesian, but nearly all of them listed are III or IV. What might make the II ones easy to learn?

In my conjecture, Swahili and Malay/Indonesian are easier to learn because, as I stated, they are written in the ordinary Roman alphabet.

(Not knowing what "old II" meant, I didn't examine the associated list.)

 

[lpetrich]

Here is the complete list of III and old II langs that the State Department listed:
...
Some non-IE langs are difficulty II: Swahili and Malay/Indonesian, but nearly all of them listed are III or IV. What might make the II ones easy to learn?

In my conjecture, Swahili and Malay/Indonesian are easier to learn because, as I stated, they are written in the ordinary Roman alphabet.

So putting little marks on letters makes a language very difficult to learn?

Let's see which I and II languages use what.

• Forward (acute) accent: French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian
• Backward (grave) accent: French, Portuguese, Italian
• Hat (circumflex): French, Portuguese, Italian, Romanian
• Upside-down hat (breve): Romanian
• Wavy line (tilde): Spanish, Portuguese
• Double dot (diaeresis, umlaut): French, Spanish, Norwegian, German
• A-circle: Danish, Norwegian, Swedish
• O-slash: Danish, Nowegian
• Hook under letter (cedilla): French, Portuguese, Romanian

The only European languages in I and II to use no letter marks are English and Dutch. The non-European languages in II (Swahili, Malay/Indonesian) all use no marks.

(Not knowing what "old II" meant, I didn't examine the associated list.)

"Old II" refers to an earlier version of the State Department's list.

 

[Swammerdami]

So putting little marks on letters makes a language very difficult to learn?

Why insist on misconstruing my words? Is it some fetish?

I think Greek and Cyrillic alphabets would take some effort to learn. I've not waded through the State Dept. list to see if the difficulty rating of Every.Single.Language fits my hypothesis.

Do we know whether inflected languages are harder to learn than those of analytic type? Swahili is a polysynthetic language and is unrelated to European languages; yet is rated as easy to learn. That it is written with Roman alphabet would seem to add support to my hypothesis. No?

 

[lpetrich]

I think Greek and Cyrillic alphabets would take some effort to learn. I've not waded through the State Dept. list to see if the difficulty rating of Every.Single.Language fits my hypothesis.

A quick trip to Wikipedia will settle this issue - Wikipedia has lots of articles on individual languages and language families. Omniglot - the encyclopedia of writing systems and languages is also a good reference.

Some writing systems are easy to learn, like the Greek and Cyrillic alphabets. Many of the letters are familiar, even if some of them have different phonetic values than similar-looking Roman-alphabet letters. Like "P" for "R".

Others are more difficult. Hebrew and Arabic writing typically treats vowels as an afterthought, usually inferred from context. Chinese has oodles of written symbols, and Japanese has some of the Chinese ones along with two syllabaries (syllable alphabets).

Do we know whether inflected languages are harder to learn than those of analytic type? Swahili is a polysynthetic language and is unrelated to European languages; yet is rated as easy to learn. That it is written with Roman alphabet would seem to add support to my hypothesis. No?

All the low-difficulty ones have some inflection. Other Germanic languages share with English numerous irregular past tenses of verbs. The Continental Western Romance languages, the best-known ones, have about as much noun morphology as English, but somewhat more adjective morphology, and much more verb morphology.

 

[steve_bank]

In some ways Chinese is easier.

I remember a little.

Kan shu ma translates literally you read books? Spoken Chines communicates more with less words.

Ni hau ma, are you felling OK?

 

[Politesse]

I did not find the Greek written language difficult to learn at all; almost all of its letters have equivalent phonemes in my native English.

 

[lpetrich]

Kan shu ma translates literally you read books? Spoken Chines communicates more with less words.

Ni hau ma, are you felling OK?

I'd like to see the absolute literal translations of these. From the looks of it it's

Read book
You feel OK

 

[steve_bank]

Kan shu ma translates literally you read books? Spoken Chines communicates more with less words.

Ni hau ma, are you felling OK?

I'd like to see the absolute literal translations of these. From the looks of it it's

Read book
You feel OK

Learning a language like Chinese and Spansih is to understnd thoughts abd feelings which are epressed diffently in language and culture.

Spanish has a fluid syntax as opposed to more rigid English. In Spanish unless you are being formal pronouns are optional.

Latino immigrants who are not proficient in English speak with Spanish syntax and grammar using English words. I understood that when I began to learn Spanish. Chinese do the same at times.



The context of any language is learned as you grow up in it. In Chinese as I remember 'you go store' could mean go right now,
go in the future, or you went in the past.

The thing language teaches you is regardless how a language sounds to you the feelings and emotions behind it are all the same.
go in the future, or you went in the past. Tense is contextual.

ni hau ma? is 'you good?' ma is the question word and ni is a pronoun. We translate as a number of contextual meanings. A Chinese not fluent in English might say 'You good?'.

Some say English is the hardest to lean as a second language.

 

[Lugubert]

Kan shu ma translates literally you read books? Spoken Chines communicates more with less words.

Ni hau ma, are you felling OK?

I'd like to see the absolute literal translations of these. From the looks of it it's

Read book
You feel OK

Regard the 'ma' as a question mark.
Look book ?
You good ?

It might look as Japanese is easier than Chinese, because the number of officially recommended characters are fewer than what you need to read a Chinese newspaper. But one problem with JP is that a character may have several readings; the majority of CH characters have one reading. One relatively uncomplicated example: The character meaning "man" is pronounced ren in CH, but hito or jin in JP, depending on context. There are many much, much worse examples. My impression after many not too successful hours is that the JP grammar is way more complicated and unsystematic than CH.

I've tried Arabic. Some classical, some Modern Standard Arabic. The absence of vowels in just about everything written but the Qur'an, children's and learners' books means that you more or less have to know the (grammar of the) language before you're able to read a text. I can't rank the difficulty of these three languages even for myself. Much depends on what resources are available, your motivation, your environment and which language skills you are aiming for. If the need were to arise, I would probably find MSA the easiest to revive and improve, then CH and hardest JP.

That said, examples of major languages that I actively have avoided are Turkic and Dravidian languages. Interesting, but they are out-prioritized by quite a few others on my list, not just because of their difficulty.

 

[lpetrich]

The context of any language is learned as you grow up in it. In Chinese as I remember 'you go store' could mean go right now,
go in the future, or you went in the past.

In Chinese, one indicates tense with adverbs, so if one omits them, one expects tense info to be filled in with context.

English speakers also use partial sentences filled in with context. Like "Where are you? In my room." Where one omits "I'm" in one's response.

Some say English is the hardest to lean as a second language.

Who?

 

[lpetrich]

Regard the 'ma' as a question mark.
Look book ?
You good ?

Russian uses "li" and I once saw it explained as "whether". Japanese also uses a "question particle", as it's sometimes called: "ka".

I've tried Arabic. Some classical, some Modern Standard Arabic. The absence of vowels in just about everything written but the Qur'an, children's and learners' books means that you more or less have to know the (grammar of the) language before you're able to read a text. I can't rank the difficulty of these three languages even for myself. Much depends on what resources are available, your motivation, your environment and which language skills you are aiming for. If the need were to arise, I would probably find MSA the easiest to revive and improve, then CH and hardest JP.

What the US FSI gives are averages from its experience, so one's experience may differ.

Lugubert, I'm curious about how easy or difficult it is to learn English. Here are some possible difficulties:

• Spelling: it's semi-logographic though letters have no marks on them.
• Phonology: lots of vowels and voiceless and voiced th.
• Grammar: numerous compound verb tenses, numerous irregular past-tense forms.

The past-tense irregularities are shared with other Germanic languages, I must note.

Has anyone in Sweden done anything analogous to the FSI's classification for Swedish speakers? Did the KGB ever work out anything analogous for Russian speakers?

 

[steve_bank]

Who? Immigrants I have known since I was a kid. My senior building I live in is international. Chinese, Vietnamese, Swiss, Latino, Indian, Native American, African immigrant, Mid East. The languages, English adaptations, and accent mix is always in the background. One learns to read the differences in English usage.

In Chinese I don't think there are tenses equivalent to our basic 7 or 8 tenses with conjugations. There are equivalent grammar to participles. In English to go becomes going and gone. Regular and irregular verbs.

https://www.bsctextbooks.com/basic-chinese-tenses/

 

[lpetrich]

Basic Chinese Tenses: How to Easily Master the 4 Tenses
"Unlike other languages, such as English, that focus on when the action takes place, Chinese pays more attention to whether or not the action is complete."

That's something called verb aspect, and many of what are called verb tenses are actually tense-aspect combinations. Like in English.

 Grammatical aspect

Aspects can be formed with adverbs / particles, as in Chinese, with auxiliary verbs, as in English, or by making extra versions of verbs, as in the Slavic languages and as is reconstructed for Proto-Indo-European (the Slavic and PIE systems are separate!).

Here are some imperfective - perfective aspect pairs in Russian. Perfectives are usually prefixed imperfectives:

• delat' - sdelat' - to do
• chitat' - prochitat' - to read
• uchit' - vyuchit' - to learn
• igrat' - poigrat' - to play
• pisat' - napisat' - to write
• khotet' - zakhotet' - to want
• gotovit' - prigotovit' - to cook

Notice the variety of prefixes. All of them are also prepositions.

Sometimes imperfectives are suffixed perfectives or have vowel shifts:

• davat' - dat' - to give
• pokazyvat' - pokazat' - to show
• rasskazyvat' - rasskazat' - to tell
• otvechat’ - otvetit’ - to answer
• pokupat' - kupit' - to buy
• reshat' - reshit' - to solve, decide

Sometimes they have "suppletion", combinations of different word roots:

• govorit' - skazat' - to say, speak
• brat' - vzjat' - to take