
Language Learning Difficulty for English Speakers - tshtf
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Language_Learning_Difficulty_for_English_Speakers
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camccann
Four out of five of the most difficult languages are east Asian; not too
surprising there. The fifth, however, is Arabic, which I didn't anticipate.

Anyone know why it's apparently dramatically more difficult for a native
English speaker to learn Arabic compared to other languages which would seem
(to me, at least) equally remote from English in terms of geography, syntax,
phonology, and lexicography?

~~~
tokenadult
_Anyone know why it's apparently dramatically more difficult for a native
English speaker to learn Arabic compared to other languages which would seem
(to me, at least) equally remote from English in terms of geography, syntax,
phonology, and lexicography?_

I might hazard some informed response on that, as a native speaker of English
and student in classroom instruction at various times of German, Russian,
Modern Standard Chinese, Cantonese, Literary Chinese, Biblical Hebrew, Attic
Greek, Biblical Greek, Taiwanese, Japanese, and Hakka. But what other
languages did you have in mind that seemed to be rated as surprisingly easy by
contrast with Arabic?

P.S. Being quite the language hobbyist, I have also self-studied a variety of
other languages, including several more that are on the list included in the
submitted article. Modern Standard Chinese is by far my strongest acquired
language, but I would agree that it does not come easily for a native speaker
of English--and arguably not for most native speakers of Sinitic languages.

[http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2007-03/07/content_5812838...](http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2007-03/07/content_5812838.htm)

~~~
camccann
_I might hazard some informed response on that, as a native speaker of English
and student in classroom instruction at various times of German, Russian,
Modern Standard Chinese, Cantonese, Literary Chinese, Biblical Hebrew, Attic
Greek, Biblical Greek, Taiwanese, Japanese, and Hakka. But what other
languages did you have in mind that seemed to be rated as surprisingly easy by
contrast with Arabic?_

Disclaimer: I am almost completely uninformed about other languages beyond
assorted superficial details about a handful. That said, I would have expected
Arabic to be of no greater relative difficulty than, say, Hindi, Persian,
Hebrew, Mongolian, or such.

I mostly expected Mandarin, Cantonese, and Japanese to be of greatest relative
difficulty, from what little I know about those languages, and would have
expected Arabic (and many other languages) to be in the second category.

~~~
tokenadult
What's brutal about Chinese for a native speaker of English is phonemic tone
for speech and lack of cognate vocabulary, coupled with a writing system that
reflects a stage of development of writing from 2,000 years ago. But what is
forgiving about Chinese is that the grammatical relationships are mostly shown
by word order and function words, as in English, rather than by inflection of
words. That, to me at least, makes speaking Chinese "easier" than speaking
Russian, even though Russian is much more cognate with English.

Arabic may be especially difficult (even as compared to Hebrew, a language I
have studied much more) because the standard form of the language is so
divergent from the day by day vernacular forms, as noted by a more informed
participant who has kindly posted another comment.

The United States federal government language proficiency rating system
attempts to identify equal levels of real-world functional proficiency for
ratings of interpreters and the like. When I was last tested, the rating scale
went from 0 (with a readily apparent meaning) to 5 (a rating in principle
reserved for educated NATIVE speakers of the language) in the functional
domains of speaking, listening, reading, and writing. I was quite proud of my
4+ rating in speaking and listening to Modern Standard Chinese, but I took
quite a few years out of my life to get to that level, as have most westerners
I have ever met who have done the same.

~~~
nvoorhies
Is the state of development of writing from 2000 years ago referring to the
Chinese or Latin alphabet?

~~~
wheels
The Latin alphabet, or rather Phoenician, from which Hebrew, Arabic, Latin,
Greek and Cyrillic scripts are descended, is more like 3500 years old.

~~~
tokenadult
But both the specific letter forms of the Roman alphabet and, more relevantly,
the general spelling patterns of English are much more recent than that (as
they would have to be). But, yes, writing is more ancient in the Near East
than it is in China, for sure. It's just that it has gone through more
language-specific adaptations, especially in the direction of exhaustively
spelling all speech sounds with a minimal number of writing characters, than
writing in China has.

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Kliment
Having acquired Finnish (twelve years ago) and German (in the last two years),
coming from a Bulgarian background, I've been thinking about language
transfer. I don't think this list is very specific to English.

My own limited inquiry into the matter (collecting general opinions from
people who have learned foreign languages and ordering them by subjective
difficulty) seems to generate a list where difficulty correlates strongly with
distance from Latin. I suspect this is related to the way languages are
taught, rather than the way they are structured. Our formal grammars appear to
fit Latin very well, probably for historical reasons. Here's some ideas:

1\. Finnish is known worldwide as a difficult language to learn. It has an
extremely complex grammar (when put in Latin terms). Finnish-born children
acquire Finnish in about the same time Spanish-born children acquire Spanish,
but Spanish adults have much more difficulty learning Finnish than Finnish
adults have learning Spanish. This suggests that teaching methods might favour
Latin-like languages. A further supporting data point is that foreign people
living in Finland who take Finnish courses do better at tests than people who
don't, but take much longer (many years) to start actively using Finnish in
casual situations (conversation) and are never as comfortable as people who
acquire it without courses. This might of course be a factor of what kind of
people take courses.

2\. Finnish sentences are structurally some of the simplest, possibly the
simplest of any European language.

3\. The European languages furthest away from Latin appear to have the most
complex case systems. Cases appear to be a hack to fit a language into a Latin
grammar. Cases in point are Russian, Hungarian and Finnish.

4\. Constructing a Finnish grammar that is almost entirely correct is possible
without the use of cases.

5\. This sort of grammar is more than sufficient for everyday casual
communication.

This leads me to think that people who take Finnish courses might be too
afraid of making mistakes to actually communicate. People who don't know
they're "doing it wrong" focus more on the result of communication rather than
the formal correctness. I know I am consciously ignoring a lot of the
grammatical rules in German, but I can communicate in it freely. Native German
speakers may get confused by me switching cases and articles at times, but I
am always understood. I tend to prefer German to all other languages I know
(all of which I have used for many more years than German) when speaking to
native German speakers. I wonder how the list in the OP would look like if the
target was a "conversation-sufficient" subset of the language. This would be
much more meaningful than "general proficiency" (and much less testable).

~~~
henrikschroder
When you go to school in Sweden, you get taught a Swedish grammar that is also
slightly wrong, but one that makes Swedish to be closer to Latin than what it
is. The purpose of this is to make it easier to learn the other big European
languages like English, German, French or Spanish.

However, if you take linguistics at university level in Sweden, the first
thing they tell you is to forget everything you were taught earlier, because a
lot of it is wrong.

I'm really curious if this actually works, if it really makes it easier for
kids to learn the other languages by learning a wrong version of grammar for
their own language.

~~~
Kliment
Actually, I meant it the other way around. Teaching a grammar that is
constructed from the language, not one that fits better to Latin. I think it
would help if each language was thought with a specialized grammar for that
language rather than through subsets and hacks on top of a "universal" one.

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henrikschroder
It would be very interesting to see this list from the perspective of other
languages. This list only shows their "distance" from English and not from
each other, but would it for example be easier for a Chinese person to learn
Japanese or English?

And if you take it further, could you make a generic ranking list and see
which languages are generally the easiest to learn?

~~~
xiaoma
Here in Taiwan, I meet tons of Mandarin speakers learning Japanese. In
general, I'd say it's pretty easy for them. There are a limited number of
sounds in Japanese only a few of which pose difficulty for Mandarin speakers
and the kanji are a slightly simplified version of Chinese characters.

There are a _lot_ of cognates between Chinese and Japanese, there's a good
deal of overlap in terms of history, food and religion and best of all there's
nearly as much Japanese media available for those who want it as there is
English media.

However, the Japanese people I've met here studying Mandarin usually have a
tough time of it. They can usually read pretty well, but their pronunciation
and general communication abilities tend to be far worse than those of the
students of every other nationality I've met at the language centers. The
difference was absolutely shocking when I first started studying here.

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wheels
Their "languages closely related" is way off. They should have just labeled it
"easy languages", since that's apparently what they mean. Icelandic, in the
third category, is uncontroversially more _related_ to English than most of
the (predominantly romance) languages in the first category, as English and
Icelandic are both Germanic languages.

~~~
klipt
While grammatically, English is Germanic, it did borrow a ton of vocabulary
from French after the Norman invasion, so from a lexical perspective it's
related to the romance languages by proxy.

~~~
wheels
Yes -- and it also inherited French-style plurals (blessedly), and I believe
is the only Germanic language with a gerund.

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kentosi
I like the way they've arranged all the vocab, pronounciation, grammar links
together for each language in a nice organised fashion.

I'm a little skeptic though of their classification of difficulty. I
understand that they're categorising it based on English being a starting
point, but after a certain level of proficiancy (what most people would
classify as "intermediate" level), language learning just becomes a matter of
constant exposure. I'm sure this would hold equally for both French or
Japanese (apart from writing).

~~~
MikeMacMan
Yes, but it still requires _more_ exposure for the more difficult languages.

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RiderOfGiraffes
I am by no means proficient in anything other than my first language, but I
found other languages _much_ easier to start on once I'd learned lojban. it
"untaught" lots of things that I took for granted, and gave me some new
structures and ideas that served me in good stead.

It is said that your first acquired language takes four years, subsequent ones
take two each. Lojban takes about six months. Perhaps if you want to learn a
language, learn lojban first.

~~~
klipt
They've actually done studies on that - not with lojban, but with another
simple constructed language: Esperanto. They found that students studying
Esperanto for a year followed by French for 3 years fared better than students
studying French for 4 years:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto#Language_acquisition>

~~~
tokenadult
Any such claim about Esperanto should be regarded as a claim that needs
further verification.

<http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html>

<http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ranto/>

Anyway, it is very doubtful that such a claim, even if true for speakers of
English learning French in England, would be true for speakers of Chinese
learning Japanese in China (or the other way around) or for any number of
other likely pairs of native and acquired languages.

~~~
klipt
I only mention the Esperanto studies because (1) they seem to confirm
RiderOfGiraffes' intuition (2) AFAIK Esperanto is the only auxlang for which
such studies have been done.

I suspect similar effects could be found with lojban, and would love to see
more research in that area. However AFAIK no such research currently exists.

I read the _ranto_ ages ago and while it makes many good points, none of them
are particularly relevant to the suggestion that the studies were faked. In
fact imperfections like sexism could be advantageous if the student then
proceeds to a similarly sexist European language (i.e. most of them).

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MikeMacMan
I wonder what is meant by general proficiency?

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gms
I'm surprised that Arabic and Hebrew aren't in the same category.

(disclaimer/foonote: I'm a native speaker of Arabic)

~~~
nvoorhies
A relative lack of dialectical variation in Hebrew might explain it.

~~~
gms
Thanks, hadn't even considered that!

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known
Everybody in India can speak minimum 3 languages.

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earl
Interesting list. I can certainly agree that Russian is a difficult language
to acquire for native english speakers; far harder than Spanish.

I am curious, however: has anyone found nonobvious ways to make money with
language skills (obvious meaning translator, etc)? While some of these, esp eg
Arabic or Russian, might be very interesting to learn, and it would probably
be a great experience living in an Arabic speaking country, there are high
costs -- the education and the time living in a country and not getting much
done but language courses. What are good ways of making this a financially
sound thing to do, or will it always be solely a cultural experience?

~~~
tokenadult
In general, the return on investment for a native speaker of English learning
any language as a second language is lower than the return for the same person
learning a lot of mathematics. People who don't know English usually find
better gains by learning English, but they still have to learn some other
career skill as well. The least expensive and most effective way to learn a
language is to learn a bit of it before foreign residence (so that you'll live
in fear of not knowing the language, and study hard) following that by foreign
residence and continued part-time focused language study while working and
participating in the culture in the new country. And that's just how a lot of
second-language speakers of English reach very high levels of proficiency in
English.

