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Difficulty in Learning another Language?

The numbers again,
  • I (24 weeks, 600 class hours) Afrikaans, Catalan, Danish, Dutch, Galician, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Swedish
  • I' (30 weeks, 750 class hours) French
  • II (36 weeks, 900 class hours) German, Haitian Creole, Indonesian, Malay, Swahili, Javanese, Jumieka
  • III (44 weeks, 1100 class hours) (most languages)
  • IV (88 weeks, 2200 class hours) Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean
1 week = 25 class hours = 5 hours per day, 5 days per week

How long to learn Spanish as an adult - Spanish language learning forums
Awaken said:
1000 hours is probably a decent guess for English to Spanish I would say. From the Esperanto studies (probably a little biased, but useful nonetheless).

The Institute of Cybernetic Pedagogy at Paderborn (Germany) has compared the length of study time it takes natively French-speaking high-school students to obtain comparable 'standard' levels in Esperanto, English, German, and Italian.[30] The results were:
2000 hours studying German = 1500 hours studying English = 1000 hours studying Italian (or any other Romance language such as French) = 150 hours studying Esperanto.
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The closest I could come to a source was
L'enseignement des langues étrangères comme politique publique - Rapports publics - La Documentation française
and then
L'enseignement des langues étrangères comme politique publique - Google Translate: "Foreign language teaching as public policy"
François GRIN
Professeur, Université de Genève
Directeur adjoint, SRED

GIving source
Flochon, Bruno, 2000 : « L'espéranto », in Gauthier, Guy (ed.) Langues: une guerre à mort, Panoramiques. 4 e trim. 48: 89-95. - Google Translate: "Languages: a war to the death."

I also found Learning curves in "easy" and "difficult" languages - Open Forum - LingQ Language Forums - but the Wikipedia articles on Esperanto and the Paderborn method have been updated to edit out these claimed results.
 
 Chinese grammar looks easy to start with, because Chinese is nearly inflectionless. But Chinese has complexities of its own.

Chinese Grammar 101: Ultimate Guide for Beginners - ImproveMandarin
Though the most common word order is SVO, Chinese speakers often use topic-comment arrangement, moving whatever is being talked about to the front. An English example would be making "I don't like coffee" into "Coffee I don't like" to indicate that one is talking about coffee.

Chinese has plural endings for pronouns, but Chinese speakers seldom use plural endings for anything else, indicating plurality by saying many of it.

Possession is indicated with the postposition de, like a preposition, but following its object instead of preceding it. Much like the English preposition "of". Adjectives are often used with de if they have more than one syllable.

Tense and aspect are indicated with adverbs.

There are three different forms of "to be" - shì with nouns, hěn with adjectives, and zài with locations. Also three forms of "can" or "to be able" - huì "know how to", néng "possibility", and kěyǐ "permission" or "suggestion"

You don't need connecting words for phrases like "want to go" - "want go"

The word for "to have" - yǒu - is negated differently, with méi instead of the usual negator, bù. For negative commands, one uses búyào or a short version, bié.

One can make yes-no questions by adding ma at the end. But with a wh-word question, one leaves it in place and does not move it toward the beginning, as in English.

Chinese does not have "yes" or "no. One repeats the main word, either an adjective or a verb, and adds negation for a negative answer.

To say "something exists at someplace" say “the place has something”

Chinese number words are easy: 11 is ten-one, 23 is two-ten-three, etc.
 
Then a kind of word called a measure word or counter word or classifier. English has some of that with uncountable nouns, like "two cups of water" (water is uncountable) vs. "two cups" (cups are countable), but in Chinese, *every* noun is uncountable, and Chinese has lots of counter words.

yì bēi shuǐ - one cup water
yì tiáo xīnwén - one piece news
yí piàn miànbāo - one slice bread
yì shuāng xié - one pair shoe

snake, river, pants, tie, and news - tiáo - long things
umbrella, spoon, pistol, sword, teapot - bǎ - things with handles

A generic one: gè

What "two" becomes:
liǎng gè rén - two people
liǎng bēi shuǐ - two cups of water

Dates? year-month-day where the year is digit-by-digit. Thus July 2, 2023 (today's date as I write this) becomes, with English words, two-zero-two-three year seven month two day.

Days of the week are "week" number, starting with Monday = 1, but with Sunday = "day"

For time in the day, AM is "morning" and PM is "afternoon".

Adverbs always go before the main verb of a sentence.

Chinese for "and" - hé - only works with nouns and noun phrases, unlike English, where it can work with adjectives, verbs, and phrases/clauses. For those, one can use hái - "also".

Another quick guide: Introduction to Basic Chinese Grammar Rules | CLI - not as comprehensive, however.
 
lpetrich said:
Someone claimed in Quora that Chinese is the world's easiest language, except for its writing. I responded to that claim, but Quora does not have a good search system, so I was unable to find my response. :(

It would have been easier on Reddit, for instance, where I found Chinese is the easiest language in the world. And the more I learn English the more I dislike it. : ChineseLanguage and (Mandarin) Chinese is one of the easiest languages to learn. : unpopularopinion

Strictly speaking, Chinese is not one language but a close family of them: Mandarin, Cantonese, Hokkien, ... Mandarin is the most commonly-learned one, and what is most commonly meant by "Chinese".

That claimer made the argument that if one ignores its writing system, Chinese is super easy because it does not have grammatical inflections -- nouns are the same whether singular or plural, verbs have the same form no matter what tense, etc. That is not quite correct, because Chinese has some plural suffixes that are used in limited circumstances, like -men in wo "I, me" and women "we, us". BTW, the possessive adjective "my" is wo de, literally "of me", in Chinese.

There are some other such "isolating" languages, languages with little or no inflection, like Vietnamese, Khmer, and Thai, and I pointed out that that argument would make them super easy. But that claimer refused to accept my argument.

I pointed out that in the US State Department's Foreign Service Institute's estimates, they are intermediate in difficulty, like most languages, and not super easy. That claimer refused to accept that argument.
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When I did linguistics (back in the day) I was told that the rule for language difficulty/similicity comes down to how many people over the ages have learned that language as a second language. When foreigner learn a new language they struggle with ever learning the difficult bits. Over time these get knocked off. So basically, the longer a language has been an imperial language the simpler it will be. So it makes sense that Chinese would be a, comparatively, simple language.

They still have gems like: Ma
https://www.fluentu.com/blog/chinese/chinese-ma/

The rule also goes in reverse. The smaller the language and the fewer speak it the more complicated the grammar will be.
We often talk about the tragedy of so many small languages dying out, and only spoken by a handful centenarians. The truth about all these langauges is that they are incredibly difficult, often with more exceptions, than words follow the rules. Not to mention, hard to pronounce sounds.
 
That would explain the relative ease of Malay/Indonesian and Swahili. They emerged as trade languages, languages used by people with different first languages for interacting with each other. That likely explains why Swahili is non-tonal, unlike most other Bantu languages, which are tonal.
 
lpetrich said:
What might make spoken Chinese difficult for an English speaker? It has tones, levels of sound pitch that distinguish words. Denoting pitch by 1 to 5, the tones of Mandarin are 55, 35, 214, 51, of Cantonese are 55, 25, 33, 21, 23, 22, of Thai 33, 32, 451, 343, 325, of Vietnamese are 33, 22, 213, 224, 25, 221.
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This. This is what caused me to give up trying to learn Mandarin. My wife would tell me I was saying it wrong and what I should be saying and I can't hear the difference. If you don't know what you're doing wrong how can you learn to do it right??

(This cuts both ways, there are things in English that trip her up and she has a very hard time hearing what she's doing wrong. Typically they involve words with both an L and an R in reasonably close proximity, but it can be other cases also. Alexa often fails to trigger for her and she can't hear what she's doing wrong.)
 
lpetrich said:
Then a kind of word called a measure word or counter word or classifier. English has some of that with uncountable nouns, like "two cups of water" (water is uncountable) vs. "two cups" (cups are countable), but in Chinese, *every* noun is uncountable, and Chinese has lots of counter words.
Click to expand...
Yup, as far as I can tell Chinese doesn't have the concept of modifying words. It gives her a hard time with recognizing the different forms an English word can take. You simply can't have a mismatch (one cups water, he will ran) in Chinese.
 
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