
A Map Showing How Much Time It Takes English-Speakers to Learn Foreign Languages - Thevet
http://www.openculture.com/2017/11/a-map-showing-how-much-time-it-takes-to-learn-foreign-languages-from-easiest-to-hardest.html
======
xaybey
These language categorizations are famous and have been around since the 50's
- not sure what the colored map really adds. When looking at the suggested
number of hours, keep in mind that these measurements are for:

* a Foreign Service Officer (read: elite, meritocratically-selected diplomat, usually with a background in humanities, who is probably in command of another foreign language already).

* 5 hours/day of continuous study, with classroom instruction at the FSI's internal language school (which is considered the gold standard in language education). Don't expect the same results from self-study with a textbook and some subtitled movies.

* Reaching a B2-C1 level of proficiency. That's certainly conversational, but far from fluent. Consider that for Russian, the passive vocabulary of someone with a C2 proficiency is about twice that of someone with a C1.

I would never want to discourage someone from learning a foreign language, but
the notion that one could reach professional proficiency in French within ~6
months is unrealistic for 99% of learners. Even if you _lived_ there and
devoted your entire days to study, it would be difficult to ramp up that
quickly.

~~~
vidarh
Your personal difficulty with a language will also obviously drastically shift
once you've picked up another language.

E.g. I've never learnt Dutch, but I can read it passably because of my
combination of Norwegian, German and English. While getting to proficiency
written and oral would take some work I'd certainly be far easier than
starting from the base of a single language.

Same with e.g. Spanish or Italian because of the bits I remember of French
from school..

~~~
tomclive
Yep, I'll agree with this. I studied Latin for about 8 years at school and
enjoyed it, even though at the time I had thought it pretty useless.

15 years later I moved to Spain for a while and was amazed at how naturally
everything came together. Within a very short time, I was able to make sense
of written Spanish.

Conversationally, not so much but I'm sure the Latin helped.

~~~
noblethrasher
My Latin teacher often reminded us that ”Spanish is just lazy Latin“.

~~~
silverbax88
That's a common statement but somewhat inaccurate, as it omits the fact that
what most of us think of as Spanish is Castillian, which has a heavy influence
from Arabic languages.

~~~
tolger
Spanish native speaker here. The influence from Arabic is mostly in
vocabulary, about 10% of our words have Arabic roots. However, Arabic had
negligible influence in structure and grammar. Spanish is your standard Latin
derived language.

------
squarefoot
This might seem a stupid comment, and it probably is, but looking at the most
difficult languages list at the bottom (Arabic,Chinese,Japanese,Korean) the
first thought that came to mind by looking at the pattern was "the US (largest
English speaking country) have been at war with countries speaking two of
these languages, might be at war soon with a country speaking another one and
surely are not best friends with the country speaking the remaining one".

This could be pure correlation without any cause-effect, but I still wonder
how easy would be for any country to go to war with another one when most
citizens of both countries spend years communicating each other. The usual
propaganda which depicts others as demons in order to fuel hatred and "sell"
the war to the public would be a lot more difficult.

~~~
dbatten
Historically that's kind of true, but we also count Japan, South Korea, and
several Arabic-speaking countries (e.g., Kuwait) among our closest allies...

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_non-
NATO_ally](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_non-NATO_ally)

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Also Great Britain and Australia. From whom we are 'separated by a common
language'

------
wallflower
If you really want to learn a language, you can. However, throw your
assumptions about learning a language in X months or Y years. It's really up
to your actions. And it gets harder until you learn your first language, then
you can "ladder" (learn a 3rd language by using your 2nd language, not your
1st language).

There is a lot of snake oil sold out there. Similar to self-help, they all
sell the wishful idea that you can learn language without strain or effort.
That is not the case... if you are over the age of about nine. Before the age
of nine, almost every human has the ability to pick up multiple languages
without effort. As you transition into adulthood, that ability diminishes,
until it is an effort. Yes, there are people who can pick up a language
without effort like my friend in Canada who can speak many languages after
just having spent about a month or two in a place where they speak it.
However, for the vast majority, it is not going to be easy.

"Ultimately, it's not about the number of months or years [that you study],
but the number of minutes every day that you devote to this challenge. These
minutes are what truly count."

-Benny Lewis, "Fluent in 3 Months"

Remember language is to communicate. If you can communicate, express emotions,
tell people about your day, ask people about their life that might be enough.
Yes, you might not know the 10 ways to express the nuances of an emotion like
excitement. But you might know the one generic word.

Reading Harry Potter or the original novels that are so popular that they were
translated into English in your new language might take more time. Ask
yourself if you really want to be able to do that.

Going to see a comedy show in your 2nd language is not going to be fun. You'll
be knocked off your presumed language level ability perch. You likely won't
understand anything, likely. That is because humor is quite possible the
highest form of any language.

~~~
awiesenhofer
Conversely I only really started to learn english after watching american
standups and british comedy. Maybe thats more a motivational thing though

------
koopuluri
I'm curious if the converse applies: e.g. English is more difficult for native
Chinese speakers than for native Hindi speakers.

> The higher up the scale you go, the less recognizable the languages might
> look to an English-speaking monoglot.

Author seems to imply a "distance" between 2 languages that would go both
ways.

For practical purposes though, I'd think other factors like the popularity of
English/Western media and artifacts of British colonialization would make
learning English for non-native English speakers slightly easier, than the
other way around, as a result of greater chance of previous English exposure.

~~~
adimitrov
Yes, the converse applies, at least with the caveat that the week estimates
are pretty much bullshit, and the map in general is very speculative. In
foreign language teaching, you will typically speak of L1 and L2, L1 being
your native language, L2 being the language you're picking up.

The typological distance (linguistically) between languages plays a major role
in acquisition, both positively and negatively. A _positive L1 transfer_ is
something the learner can infer about the target language from their own,
while a _negative L1 transfer_ is something they assume about the target
language based on their own, but it's wrong. Overall, positive L1 transfer in
closely related languages will overwhelmingly outweigh negative transfer, but
be a lot more tricky when the languages aren't closely related typologically.

Note that typological similarity often coincides with distance in the historic
sense, but isn't the same thing. For example, both Thai and Chinese are tonal
isolating languages (same typological features) but aren't related at all.
Also, Russian and Bulgarian, for example, are very closely related, but have a
vastly different grammar, making Russian harder for a Bulgarian speaker than,
say, for a Polish speaker.

~~~
gajomi
I pretty much agree with most everything you write, but just want to add the
caveat that this is all a function of relative competence or learning stage in
an L2 language. That is to say, some languages that may be relatively easier
to partially acquire then to fully master and visa versa. A case in point, and
dear to my heart at that by way of experience, is the relative difficulty for
an L1 English speaking in forming simple grammatically correct sentences in
German and Mandarin, respectively. Whereas there is no question that Mandarin
is the harder language to master (especially if we are talking about
literacy), the high degree of analyticity relative to German makes forming
sentences from words rather intuitive for the English speaker (even if English
isn't quite as analytical as Mandarin in it's core modules). In other words,
at least from the perspective of grammar, the beginnings of Mandarin are much
easier than the beginnings of German, despite typological similarity even in
inflections for plurality and the like shared between English and German.

------
madisfun
The choice of the colors is strange. The most difficult languages are painted
blue and green, and the easiest are red, and English is pale red. I suppose it
should be the opposite.

~~~
gregoire
Indeed, the map is hard to parse. I think that this presentation gives good
advice regarding maps design: [https://speakerdeck.com/cherdarchuk/data-looks-
better-naked-...](https://speakerdeck.com/cherdarchuk/data-looks-better-naked-
maps-edition)

------
woodpanel
As a German, I'm a bit puzzled as to why Latin languages like Spanish and
Romanian, are more "similar to English" than German is.

I get that English borrows a lot of words from French but overall English and
German should have more similar origins than say Portuguese or Catalan.

Is this because of our "annoying" grammar (would make sense since Icelandic,
another Germanic language with much more complexity in this regard even makes
it into Category IV) or because German leaves little room of ambiguity (and
thus fun)?

~~~
raverbashing
They're not "similar to English", they're easier than German to learn

2 genders instead of 3 and some complication on the verb conjugations but
overall not too many difficulties.

"No gramatical cases" (as in German, but of course the cases exist), no mix
and match of ambiguous endings, no separable verbs, no crazy word order, etc

~~~
woodpanel
I was quoting the page:

"Category I: 23-24 weeks (575-600 hours) Languages closely related to English:
Afrikaans, ..., French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, ... Category
II: 30 weeks (750 hours) Languages similar to English: German"

This I understood as a ranking in similarity.

------
GolDDranks
This map is based on data from US Foreign Service Institute. The data are
quite notorious among second language acquisition researchers for its lack of
credibility – apparently there has never been published research papers
presenting the data, and the exact methods how the data were obtained,
categorized and how they arrived at the conclusions, were never published.

This should make a skeptical person wince.

From modern perspective there is AT LEAST the following concerns:

1) How was proficiency measured? The research has shown that one can reach
hugely different conclusions depending on the measure. Measuring explicit
knowledge about the language using paper test has been, and still is, a very
popular way of assessment, but the research has shown that it's hardly and
adequate one in measuring proficiency, communicative competence or grammatical
competence.

2) Are the results generalizable? It might be that the obtained results were
just an artifact of the teaching method used. It doesn't mean that Finnish
would be necessarily harder using some OTHER method than the teaching method
used at FSI.

Note that this doesn't mean to say that the data is false. It means that we
have no ways to assess if it's true or false with any confidence.

~~~
Aloha
What makes me skeptical, is they rate Arabic as much more difficult than
Hebrew, two languages with some mutual intelligibility.

~~~
dang
I would think that too, if not for this excellent comment downthread:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15822024](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15822024).

~~~
mchaver
Adding to that, I believe that Modern Hebrew has lots of loan words from
Russian and probably quite a few from English.

~~~
pvg
That probably isn't going to make a huge difference - English speakers don't
get much of a leg-up on French despite the gobs of shared vocabulary.

------
contingencies
People often ask me in China how long it took to learn Chinese. "16 years" I
tell them - "I'm still learning!" I've dabbled in French, Latin, Tai
languages, Arabic, Vietnamese, Malay/Indonesian, etc. I personally prefer non
Indo-Aryan languages as I find the grammar and conjugations too tedious, but
make an exception for French because it's so pleasant to drink there!

------
Turing_Machine
I'm really surprised (bordering on shocked) that French and Spanish are rated
the same. Not to dispute the experts, but me, Spanish seems much easier than
French. German also seems easier than French.

~~~
dmoy
The grammar in German is killer. Damn verbs at the end, it ain't right I tell
ya. (German is the only other language I know)

~~~
khedoros1
I took three years of German. Never had problems with the word order,
including verbs. I guess I'm lucky in that; I've taken some Japanese too, and
_all_ the verbs are at the end there ;-)

After all these years, I've forgotten the genders of most nouns, and I'm very
shaky on my declensions.

~~~
biot
"At the end, all verbs are."

~~~
TomK32
I'd say "Alle Verben _sind_ am Ende? Das muss nicht _sein_ ". Well, it's not
that simple.

~~~
tom_mellior
In your second example, you should have highlighted _muss_ , which is the
inflected verb here, which is always in the second position in an in a
declarative sentence (as opposed to a question or a relative clause or
whatever).

Same as in English: "All verbs _are_ at the end? That _doesn 't_ have to be".

------
hellofunk
I've always heard that Dutch (and one of its northern variants) is the closest
language to English in the world, yet it is clumped together in this map with
languages from a much different linguistic origin. Romance languages should be
harder to learn than West Germanic languages, which include English, Dutch and
German, yet some of the Romance languages are listed here as easier than
German. So that surprises me. Many sentences sound almost identical between
Dutch and English, for example. You can't really say that about a Romance
language. And the structure of the English language has much more in common
with Dutch and German than with most other languages.

~~~
icc97
I moved to Belgium 7 years ago from the UK. I live in the Dutch speaking half.

I had a very rudimentary grasp of Dutch after 18 months mostly through just
speaking to my mother-in-law and watching Dutch TV.

Then I spent another 18 months doing 3 hours a week evening classes. After
that I was proficient enough to have hour long conversations.

I don't find it very similar to English, if anything the similarities makes it
worse because they often mean something else. It is very close to German and I
can understand some German now. You do spot lots of interesting similarities
but everything is backwards for starters, it's "four and twenty" not "twenty
four" and "what want you eating?" instead of "what do you want to eat?". So
it's kind of similar but you sound really stupid unless you get it in the
right order.

I think there's a big difference between making yourself understood and
speaking without making errors. I've made a big effort to try to get the
accent correct which very few do.

~~~
petecox
"Four and twenty" is idiomatic English in that it survives in the children's
nursery rhyme _Sing a Song of Sixpence_.

It was composed around the same time that William of Orange reigned as king of
the UK, so maybe that's a Dutch influence on our language!

I only know this because Four'n Twenty is the unofficial national dish of
Melbourne. :)

~~~
hellofunk
Dutch in general is much closer to Shakespeare's era of English, which is not
modern English. Shakespeare includes phrases like "he knows not what he does"
instead of modern English, "he doesn't know what he is doing." The "is ..."
conjugations are a relatively recent invention in English, and Dutch more
closely follows old English-style construction.

~~~
icc97
I did try to imagine myself speaking Shakespearian English at times in the
beginning.

That's actually the problem of translating Shakespeare into Dutch, it just
sounds normal and less romantic.

"Romeo, where are you?"

If they'd translate it into old Dutch [0] it would give a better feel of the
language but still wouldn't be correct as Old Dutch died out in the 12th
century.

[0]:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Dutch](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Dutch)

~~~
mercutio2
“Wherefore art thou Romeo” isn’t confusing to modern English speakers because
of the archaic “art thou”, it’s confusing to modern English speakers because
it actually means “why are you [named] Romeo [implicitly, Montague]”, the
where- prefix has nothing to do with location.

It’s extremely common for modern speakers to be unaware what wherefore means.

------
jernfrost
In practice there will be a lot of other factors affecting the ease of
learning, especially if you live in respective countries. Scandinavians and
the Dutch pretty much all speak english and is internatuonally oriented so you
don’t necessarily get that much practice speaking the native language as say
in Italy or Spain.

My native Norwegian is somewhat harder to learn than similarities with english
suggests, because dislects are widely spoken everywhere including radio and
TV. In addition large number of other Scandinavians live here who speak their
native language while interacting with Norwegians.

It means my American wife can’t often decide whether she is listening to a
northern Norwegian dialect or e.g Swedish while listening to a Norwegian talk
show.

------
jasonlfunk
Interesting map but the color choices are strange to me. I typically associate
Red with difficult and Green with easy but it seems that this reverses that. I
wonder if there is a reason.

~~~
dghf
It could be a reference (possibly an unconscious one) to the fact that British
maps of the world traditionally coloured territories of the British Empire in
pink or red.

------
c3534l
As an American, I can say that it takes at _least_ two weeks in Ireland before
you can understand a damned thing they say.

~~~
patrickk
It's because your movies and tv shows move only in one direction across the
Atlantic. Also there's dozens of regional Irish accents, quite distinct from
each other, some easier to understand than others. You'd probably find
Northern Irish accents (or someone from Glasgow) most difficult to understand.

~~~
DoubleCribble
The Irish lilt is a bit of an obstacle but my money's on the the accent in the
Scottish highlands. There are times when I dunna ken a single word people are
saying.

------
Veratyr
Why did you link to this page, which is little more than blogspam wrapped
around the original source:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/7dith2/language_di...](https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/7dith2/language_difficult_rankings_in_europe_according/)

~~~
SyneRyder
You're right, that does appear to be the primary source. It's a Redditor
called Fummy who creates various maps:

[https://www.reddit.com/user/Fummy/submitted/](https://www.reddit.com/user/Fummy/submitted/)

Fummy has created a new version that corrects the colors for the rankings (so
that red is now the most difficult, green is easier), updated the data on
language difficulty, and wisely added their Reddit user link to the new image:

[https://i.imgur.com/37xlzKE.png](https://i.imgur.com/37xlzKE.png)

~~~
loopbit
But he still has the "concidered"...

~~~
SyneRyder
Hah! Well spotted! Maybe Fummy will fix that for v3...

------
creep
I have always wanted to learn another language of course, so I took an
introductory Russian course but did not follow through with my studies. The
language is interesting, but I wasn't making many connections to English so it
was difficult to keep interest. I'm taking Latin now and find I'm almost
breezing through it. I'm nowhere near conversational, but I can now read and
write grammatically complicated Latin texts. The parallels between English and
Latin, and the development of similar languages from Latin is absolutely
fascinating and I feel it will be useful in the future if I choose to learn
another language-- even if that language is not Latin-derived. I've learned a
lot about grammatical structure in general, and can extrapolate how grammar
may be used in other languages more easily. I highly recommend learning Latin,
it is a very cultural and practical study.

------
wolf550e
Why is Arabic twice harder than Hebrew, as hard as Chinese? Hebrew and Arabic
are closely related (the alphabet (well, an abjad) is almost the same, grammar
is almost the same).

~~~
Cyph0n
As an Arabic speaker, I would say it's because of regional Arabic variants.

For example, a Moroccan Arabic user would have trouble conversing with a
Tunisian Arabic user, _even though both countries are in North Africa_. On the
other hand, a Saudi Arabic user likely wouldn't even be able to tell Moroccan
Arabic from Tunisian Arabic[1], let alone understand a Moroccan or Tunisian
Arabic speaker!

The further east/west you go, the more differences arise (pronunciation,
vocabulary, and grammar), and the harder it becomes for Arabic users to
understand one another. But it can get even more hairy: in some cases, Arabic
users _from the same country_ can face trouble understanding one another in
day-to-day speech.

Given that the goal of an FSO is to understand as much of a language as
possible (I assume?), learning Arabic becomes a much more difficult task. If
the goal was just to learn MSA (Modern Standard Arabic), which is the formal
and written form of Arabic, then I think it would fall under the same category
as Hebrew. But MSA can only take you so far and won't really help you
integrate with the local population.

[1] Middle Eastern TV channels (e.g., Al Jazeera) typically include on-screen
captions in MSA if the speaker is using an "unintelligible" dialect such as
Moroccan Arabic.

~~~
gnulinux
I don't know anything about Arabic but can't see how this can affect English
speakers learning rate. This same situation exist in almost every large
country. German, for example, can have different phonology and cases based on
region. Similarly, Russian too. Turkish pronunciation changes very heavily
based on region.

~~~
Grue3
I have never had any trouble understanding anyone speaking Russian from any
part of the country. The differences in dialects are hardly noticeable, and
these days almost non-existent (probably due to Soviet standardization
efforts). The most prominent difference is probably pronouncing unstressed "o"
as "a" (akanie, this is considered "correct" pronounciation) or as "o"
(okanie).

~~~
pandaman
When I just began speaking English more or less fluently I had no problem with
American English but British just sounded like a different language to me. I
had to watch any movie with British English with subtitles. Nowadays I have to
make an effort to recognize British accent otherwise it sounds no different
than American.

I imagine different regional accents in Russian could be the same for non-
native speakers. What a native speaker does not even notice could be
completely unintelligible for somebody with just few hundred hours of studying
the language.

------
WhitneyLand
Warning: Certain tech jobs and other fields, can enable options to take a
couple of years and work in some pretty cool places.

If you have any such romantic thoughts entering your head after reading those
numbers, please just throw them out the window if you tend toward jobs with
crunch modes, big ambitious goals, etc, especially ones without a lot of
personal interaction (like coding in a cube for 12hrs/day). These factors can
drastically reduce your efficiency in learning the language.

I did an expat tour for a few years and it was a great experience, but at the
time didn’t have the foresight to think through this part and it was quite
frustrating.

------
Fummy
Anyone whose intrerested, this website has the old version of my map. After I
posted it to reddit people had some suggestions. Switch the colours, update it
for the new German and French rankings, show Asia also.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/7ewn04/language_di...](https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/7ewn04/language_difficult_rankings_in_europe_according/)

[https://imgur.com/gallery/oFbTauc](https://imgur.com/gallery/oFbTauc)

these are the final versions.

------
tehwalrus
Lots of people pointing out that languages are hard, the numbers given are for
really intensive programmes etc.

Not that I had any success with it, but here is a book/site about how to learn
which I found interesting:

[https://www.fluentin3months.com](https://www.fluentin3months.com)

The theory is to start from day 1 with 15 minute real conversations with
native speakers (Skype pals). You either pay them or offer them the same in
English afterwards. You are _not_ permitted to fall back to another language
during the call! This makes you study damn hard between sessions to improve
you vocabulary and reduce the awkwardness. Benny (the author) spent months
working in Spain and learning no Spanish, and stumbled on this method as a
last resort.

It is very similar in spirit (immersion, but not requing presence in a native
speaking country) to the Kato Lomb approach:

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kató_Lomb](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kató_Lomb)

Which is documented in her book "Polyglot". (Cut off from native speakers she
used romance novels, which have a very low reading age, dictionaries of the
language itself, rather than translation ones, and radio broadcasts, and was
so successful that the Russians arrested her as a spy when they took Hungary
in WW2, and she addressed a soldier in perfect Russian.)

~~~
marcus_chang
> Not that I had any success with it, but here is a book/site about how to
> learn which I found interesting:

> [https://www.fluentin3months.com](https://www.fluentin3months.com)

He hasn't had any success with it either. Benny is incredibly bad at speaking
the languages he's claimed to have "learned" in 3 months.

~~~
emtel
I had years of classroom German in high school and basically cannot hold a
conversation. Yes, Benny sounds like shit, and has to work pretty hard to
express himself, but he is able to hold conversations with people (there are
videos). To me the idea that one could get to even that rudimentary level of
conversational use in 3 months is pretty revelatory.

My point is even if he's "bad" at these languages, he's done something I
didn't previously think was even possible.

~~~
marcus_chang
The only languages that he's become even somewhat competent at are the ones
closely related to languages that he already knew.

Here's a video of him "holding a conversation" in Mandarin: https:
[https://youtu.be/hoWXYmLpNJY?t=643](https://youtu.be/hoWXYmLpNJY?t=643)

It's a series of non-stop "uh-huh's" and, frankly, it's embarrassing. He's a
marketing gimmick and pretty reviled by the polyglot community for
trivializing how much effort learning a language actually takes.

------
XR0CSWV3h3kZWg
As an English speaker who learned basic Korean as my second language I am
surprised to see it ranked as hard as Japanese and Chinese. There are only a
handful of phonemes that are difficult (largely because they split the
difference between g/k and l/r) and the language is highly regular and the
alphabet is simple. Chinese seemed near impossible with the tonal nature as
well as needing to memorize a large number of chinese symbols.

------
KennyCason
I saw a few comments regarding the difficulty of languages within Category V.
Particularly Japanese/Chinese.

I speak Mandarin Chinese and Japanese on a near daily basis, and definitely
consider Japanese to be more difficult than Chinese. Nowadays Chinese
everyday, previously Japanese everyday. I find both languages and cultures to
be very fun and will point out some of the key differences that I think make
Chinese easier than Japanese. I also encourage anyone to jump in either of the
languages and have fun. It has been life changing for me. :)

\- Chinese grammar is far simpler (less fluff) and somewhat maps to similar
word ordering as English. Japanese also has lots of fluff and rigid rules for
grammar, and the word ordering/sentence structures are much more alien than
Chinese to an English speaker. For example, English: "I will go to the store",
Chinese: "I go store", Japanese: "I SUBJECT_MARKER store DIRECTION_MARKER go".
(fun fact, Japanese grammar is not actually backwards as people often say,
it's more like a bubble of nested clauses, can elaborate more if anyone
cares.)

\- Chinese verbs/adjectives for example, don't conjugate, you just add a few
context words. Japanese, while logical, still has more conjugation
rules/exceptions (though not near as awful as English) For example, English:
"I was a Marine", Chinese: "I before is Marine", Japanese: "I SM Marine was".

\- Japanese formalities are far more deep/complicated than Chinese. Yes,
Chinese has formalities, but anyone who has done serious deep dives in
Japanese business / honorifics will understand.

\- Chinese while written has a high barrier to entry because it's all
characters, they at least with very very few exceptions, all have only one
reading. This makes memorizing them much easier than Japanese. In Japanese,
you have two forms of reading (onyomi & kunyomi), you can think of it as the
Chinese & Japanese readings. Most characters have at least 2 readings, and
some even more. This makes memorizing them more complicated.

\- Chinese characters are simplified, thus easier to write.

\- Japanese in addition to Kanji (Chinese characters), also has 2 phonetic
systems, katakana (for foreign/loan words), hiragana (Japanese words). And
hiragana gets mixed in with kanji (loosely as the conjugated part of verbs and
other grammar). A new learner of Japanese would be excited to learn hiragana,
only to find out, no one writes in all hiragana (which would be awful to
read). So, they end up not being able to really read much, until they start
learning lots of kanji. So the phonetic systems only really help when you are
writing and forget a kanji. But honestly, you'll find that you just type both
languages 99% of the time so it doesn't matter as much. Except that I type
Chinese much faster since words are literally just shorter.

\- The hard parts of Chinese are the tones. Japanese pronunciation is by far
easier. Cantonese pronunciation is harder than Mandarin as there are also more
tones. (to me at least)

\- Both China and Japan have deep histories and cultures, which finds
themselves at the heart of both languages. Both will take many many years to
sink in and feel comfortable.

\- Another cultural item but I find Japanese people much more willing to speak
to foreigners in Japanese, and have patience with bad Japanese. Chinese people
are much more direct and likely to laugh at your Chinese pronunciation or make
fun of your speaking early on, or even just never speak to you in Chinese and
prefer to use English. This happens in both cultures, and the better you get
the more likely both countries will be willing to speak in their native
languages with you, so just push through it, and don't take it personal. When
you're abroad, they'll be much more likely to speak their native language with
you since most people abroad won't be able to speak very proficient English.
Which is one of many reasons why studying abroad can be hugely helpful to
learning the language. I also recommend to just be conscious of whether or not
that native wants to use speak with you. Some people try and force it.

I have also studied Korean and put it on par with Japanese, and thankfully
because I know Chinese/Japanese characters, I can more easily remember/guess
many Korean words which are actually rooted in Chinese. I feel bad for people
trying to brute force memorize hangul words (or any alphabet to be honest)

~~~
germainelol
If the article is about speaking skills, I'm surprised to see these languages
as the most difficult. Most English speakers I know that have lived/worked in
Korea/Japan/China have found it rather easy to pick up the language. Writing
is another matter of course...

(I live in HK btw)

~~~
KennyCason
I think the primary focus was relative difficulty amongst languages. I found
picking up conversational Chinese to be about 1.5-2x easier than Japanese due
to how different Japanese grammar was than English. Similarly, Spanish is far
easier than both.

Fun side note, My trip to HK was interesting because people told me English
would get me around easily, but when I arrived I found Mandarin far more
conveneient which surprised me. (I’m planning on visiting HK sometime next
year)

~~~
mrschwabe
Not anywhere near proficient in either, but personally found it more difficult
to approach Mandarin because of tones and the writing.

At least with Japanese, you can start practicing by writing/saying aloud
romaji and begin to make sense of pronunciation (later transitioning away from
romaji entirely once you have learned hirigana).

With mandarin there is no 'romaji' and as such you can't just practice by
writing down Chinese words and reading them aloud as you would an english word
(cause tones).

Maybe it's different once you get over the initial hump in Mandarin.

So would it be fair to assume that Mandarin is easier 'long term' versus
Japanese; ie- Japanese easy to start/learn, hard to master - Mandarin
difficult to start/learn but easier to master?

~~~
KennyCason
I think Chinese is also easier to get started with. Chinese actually does have
a "romaji" like alphabet called "pinyin". Most Chinese books will start with
pinyin and will often have either pinyin written above the characters early
on, or have a dialogue section in characters and another section in pinyin.
Example: "I am American" -> 我是美国人(is is america person) -> wo shi meiguoren

You could also write the pinyin as "wo3 shi4 mei3guo2ren2" or as "wǒs hì
měi​guó​rén", but the tones aren't usually only written in textbooks. If two
Chinese people are typing pinyin (because they don't have access to Chinese
input method), they won't write the tones and will write it as my first pinyin
example.

I actually think, all-around, with the exception of pronunciation Chinese is
easier. Both are difficult to master due to their deep and unique
cultures/histories/ traits.

Anecdotally speaking, I have a good number of friends/acquaintances who have
come back from China/Taiwan/Japan and I feel that on average the people speak
better Chinese than the Japanese counterparts.

I also studied through business Japanese and Chinese in college and
lived/studied in Japan. My finding was that the students in advanced Chinese
class could speak significantly more than that students in Japanese class
could speak. This did imo, have a bit to do with the differences in how the
classes were taught, but it didn't seem to account for everything.

This is just from my anecdotal experience, and opinion from myself
learning/speaking both languages for the past 13 years, so I wouldn't be
surprised if others have a different experience.

~~~
mrschwabe
Thanks for those insights - that is interesting and very helpful.

Seems you have more Chinese background so you may be a tad biased but please
give your honest opinion (which is valued greatly, given your extensive
experience!): which is more fun to speak & listen to, Japanese or Mandarin ?

Also you're planning to visit/live in HK do you plan to (or already)
learn(ing) Cantonese ?

~~~
KennyCason
I have much more experience with Japanese. I started Japanese a year earlier
than Chinese and studied them concurrently after that. I also studied abroad
in Japan for a year. I have also written/read/used Japanese considerably more.
While I did concurrently speak/use Chinese often during that period, I found I
had to put less effort into Chinese. (We're still talking 1000s of hours).
Nowadays, I use Chinese much more frequently because my wife is Chinese and
our language-of-communication is Chinese. We've been married for 6.5 years, so
that certainly helped my Chinese ramp up and overtake my Japanese. However, in
terms of scientific vocabulary, only until recently, my Japanese vocab was
greater than my Chinese. I've been reading many more books and forcing myself
to write more in Chinese to build up my skills. (Have a few random posts on my
blog) It's amazing how important all aspects:
listening/reading/writing/speaking are important to learning a language. :)

~~~
mrschwabe
Thanks again KC ! Inspiring stuff. Bookmarked your blog for future reading.

------
littlestymaar
Fun to see _Breton_ , the local language from Brittany appearing on this map.
unfortunately, this language was decimated by decades of coercive measures
from the French government during the 20th century. And nowadays, almost no-
one speaks it as its first language even among the elderly in the most remote
places of the countryside. :(

------
rnikander
I have a harder time (at least as a beginner) with Russian than I do with
Mandarin, because of the multiple cases and verb forms. In Mandarin I learn
one word and can use it. In Russian that word has 10-20+ different forms.
(This is about speaking, not writing.) Maybe it clicks at some point. I never
got past the beginner stage.

~~~
tigershark
Do you mean the declinations? In that case if I remember correctly Russian has
5 declinations, not 10-20+. I never tried to learn mandarin but I guess that
it will be _much_ more difficult than Russian. I learnt to read Russian in my
free time during a couple of days. I can't even imagine how long I would need
to learn to read mandarin. I was quite quick with hiragana and katakana but
all in all they are just over 100 characters and now I almost completely
forgot them after years of not practicing. Mandarin has something like tens
_of thousand_ unique characters.

~~~
pandaman
Russian has 6 cases for nouns (and rudimentary 7th), together with plural this
is already 12 forms a noun can take. Verbs change by tense, person, plurality
and gender in the past singular. However there is also aspect and you probably
want to know both perfect and imperfect verbs for the same action. Movement
verbs have directionality on top of that. Adjective are changing together with
the nouns and also have "brief" form. So yeah, you need to learn about a dozen
forms for something which is one-two syllables in Mandarin. Of course, most of
the forms are just semi-regular mutations of prefix and/or suffix but it
doesn't help when you are trying to recognize them in speech.

~~~
tetromino_
> Russian has 6 cases for nouns (and rudimentary 7th)

And rudimentary 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th :)

Vocative: exists for religious words (Боже - Oh God), names ending in а/я
(Кать - Hey, Katya!), and some archaic expressions.

Partitive: exists as a separate case for many common mass nouns (чашка чаю -
cup of tea, ложка мёду - spoon of honey) but usually can be replaced with
genitive.

Locative: exists as a separate case for a small number of nouns (в лесу - in
the forest, на дому - at home, на двери́ - on the door; compare with о две́ри
stress pattern in the prepositional); for most nouns, it just coincides with
the prepositional case.

Counting form: exists only in the plural for many units of measure and only
with exact numeric quantities greater than or equal to 5 (восемь бит - eight
bits; compare to количество битов - number of bits)

Paucal counting form: exists as a separate case for a few common nouns, used
with exact numeric quantities between 1.5 and 4 (полтора часа́ - one and a
half hours; compare to ча́са, which would be the expected stress pattern for
the genitive); for most nouns, this coincides with the genitive.

~~~
pandaman
I just meant vocative since it's a proper case in other Slavic languages. A
technical question - how do you type stress accents? Phone?

~~~
tetromino_
Technical answer - see
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alt_code](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alt_code)

In Windows, you'll need to enable a registry key.

In Linux, I do Ctrl-Shift-u 0301 after the vowel to insert the stress mark
(U+0301, combining accute accent).

If you don't have unicode input, the simplest solution is to copypaste from
Wikipedia.

~~~
pandaman
I see. Thought there could be a regular input method like in French. French
accents actually work with US English keyboard layout on Mac but not with
Russian.

------
BuckRogers
Language is a fascinating subject as always, I just wish there were a way to
filter out non-native/fluent speakers from comments on said languages.
Repeating what was read elsewhere doesn't really matter.

I once had a guy sit at my dinner table telling me how easy Spanish is to
learn when he didn't know the language. I had my wife (a native Spanish
speaker) promptly embarass him, he claimed to speak Spanish, why insult my
wife who has native fluency (but still works at her own language, as I try to
improve on my native English) by trivializing the language as 'easy'?

His wife spoke Cantonense and he never could figure it out, so I assume it was
a defense mechanism to say the language I'm around is "easier". Objectively
easy? Don't say so unless you're fully fluent, because you might get punked at
my dinner table.

------
rurban
This map doesn't make much sense as it doesn't seperate between speaking,
listening, reading and writing. Which is critical for e.g Chinese or Korean.
You can learn to speak Chinese in 2 days to max 2 weeks. It's so extremely
simple and regular. Same for Korean which is even simplier. But Chinese had by
far the most difficulties in reading and writing the irregular and
historically loaded kanji signs. In opposite to Korean, which is of all
written language on Earth the simplier and easiest. Any alien landing on earth
will immediately be able to pick up Hangul. Thanks to the most recent
modernization, which is always simplification.

Eg think of English as modernized German. Or upper German to lower German. And
then the old dialects from the mountains. And then all back to India.

~~~
sweezyjeezy
> You can learn to speak Chinese in 2 days to max 2 weeks

I don't speak Chinese, but my understanding was that the tonal stuff was
pretty tough for those with no background in Asian languages?

~~~
rurban
Nope, cannot confirm. Just try a "Learn Chinese in one day" course. Speaking a
proper r in other languages is much harder, than the Chinese sing sang without
any r.

------
JepZ
As far as I understand it, modern English is a mix of Germanic and Romance
Languages, just radically simplified. It explains why there are often two
words in english which mean the same:

    
    
      - liberty => libertas (Latin)
      - freedom => Freiheit (German)
    

So being born as an english native speaker gives you the advantage of not
having the immediate need to learn a foreign language, but on the other hand
it is much harder to learn one, as your own language doesn't use many of the
widespread grammatical elements.

So while you might easily pick up a lot of vocabulary for central european
languages, German seems to be harder to learn as its grammar is a little more
complicated (but still very close compared to asian languages).

------
akvadrako
Too bad they don't mention Esperanto, just to give some perspective. The
evidence and my experience as someone who struggles with foreign languages is
it's about 10x easier than Dutch.

That would make makes all the languages in this map seem much more similar in
difficulty.

------
glorkk
I always found it interesting that English is classified as a Germanic
language while it is more similar (vocabulary and grammar) to Romance
languages than to some Germanic languages, including German.

------
eric-hu
I'm learning Thai right now and I just started learning the writing system.

Coming from a native English speaking background, speaking Chinese with my
family, I can empathize with people whr find tones hard.

I've found it fairly easy to pick up Cantonese words even though there are
more tones than Mandarin. But with Thai, there are long vowels and short
vowels in addition to tones. It's a totally new concept to me. I can't
confidently distinguish between "nam" and "naam" except for certain tones.

~~~
zackva
I'm Thai and can confirm. Words with five different intonations can have
totally different meanings.

------
sguav
Can't stop thinking of that `concidered` in the top image...

~~~
loopbit
Me either... Ironic that a graphic made by a group who trains diplomats in
foreign languages won't pay that much attention to writing correctly in
theirs.

Edit: Apparently the image was not produced by the FSI, but by a redditor:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15822493](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15822493)

------
sytelus
So as you go further out from English speaking country, language becomes more
different and more harder to learn? The gradient coloring on the map would
have been nice.

------
pvaldes
Spanish is definitely more easy to grasp than French. There are a few traps in
the road and many variants, but phonetically is much simpler. You can recite
any text in standard spanish correctly in a day even if you do not understand
a word of what you are saying. The main problem in this sense is the local
vocabulary and idioms. American spanish is extremely diverse and rich in terms
and meanings.

------
jason_slack
I am learning Chinese and have been for 2 years and I think I still will be in
5 more years. Hoping to add Korean and Japanese at some point though.

------
leke
Finnish 834+ weeks for me.

------
booleandilemma
Is it just a coincidence that the farther out from the UK you go the more
weeks it takes to learn the language?

~~~
someemptyspace
I don't think it's a coincidence at all. The closer a language and it's
speakers are to English speakers the more likely those languages are to cross-
pollinate, by sharing vocabulary, grammar, and culture. It makes sense that
the closer someone is to you both culturally and geographically that the
easier it is to speak their language, and understand their meaning.

~~~
DonaldFisk
Absent are Celtic languages, which have hardly any shared vocabulary with
English, and completely different grammars (though lots of shared culture).
Irish is listed as taking 1100 class hours to learn here:

    
    
        http://multilingualbooks.com/languagedifficulty.html
    

i.e. category 4 on the original web page.

~~~
laurentoget
the likelihood an american foreign service employee would ever need to use a
celtic language is not very high. similar probably holds for basque which i
hear is not the easiest to learn either.

~~~
dordoka
I'm basque and I can confirm that basque is quite more complicated than
english.

In fact, if you check the map, there's a gray spot on the north of Spain/South
of France. That's Euskadi (Basque Country area).

~~~
julenx
The region where Basque is spoken is not gray because of its difficulty, but
because there's no data [1].

[1]
[https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/7dith2/language_di...](https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/7dith2/language_difficult_rankings_in_europe_according/dpylzbx/)

~~~
dordoka
Yes, poorly explained on my comment (not native english speaker, obviously). I
just wanted to point out the region where basque is spoken. Thanks for the
info.

------
cluoma
Something I discovered recently is that learning a second language is hard and
takes a lot of work. I moved to Germany 3 years ago thinking I would just kind
of pick it up as I go. Well, that didn't really happen. So now I am spending 3
of my evenings per week learning German after work.

~~~
thg
I take that you've never heard of Mark Twain's "The Awful German Language"[0]?
My favorite quote is

 _" My philological studies have satisfied me that a gifted person ought to
learn English (barring spelling and pronouncing) in thirty hours, French in
thirty days, and German in thirty years. It seems manifest, then, that the
latter tongue ought to be trimmed down and repaired. If it is to remain as it
is, it ought to be gently and reverently set aside among the dead languages,
for only the dead have time to learn it."_

Although, as a native speaker I can't comment on whether that's actually
accurate.

[0]:
[https://www.cs.utah.edu/~gback/awfgrmlg.html](https://www.cs.utah.edu/~gback/awfgrmlg.html)

~~~
peoplewindow
German definitely is difficult in some respects for an English speaker.
English grammar has simplified over time in ways that German has not. For
instance English used to have a distinction between formal and informal you
(thou and ye), centuries ago but that long since passed into disuse. Nowadays
there is only one form of "you". Likewise, the English of the 11th century had
the Germanic three genders: male, female and neutral. However Old English
would be unintelligible to a modern speaker. Gender was gone by the 1300's.

All these things cause tremendous problems for learning the language because
you have to track distinctions in the language that don't exist natively so
you never had to think about before. Native speakers learn genders just by
hearing them repeatedly, at the same time as learning the words, but English
speakers learning German normally need to study dictionaries a lot to learn
new words and as such genders often get lost or muddled along the way.

One thing that has often intrigued me and which I never saw an explanation for
is why older languages often have more elaborate and complex grammar than
modern languages, and why English has simplified over time more than others.
German seems to have hardly simplified at all outside of the forced spelling
reform. The simplification of English grammar has been continual and is
ongoing today - we're in the middle of losing the distinction between "less"
and "fewer" for example, and "whom" is virtually dead. Presumably there's a
grammatical limit somewhere, and presumably _very_ old languages were simpler
than medieval languages. But Latin is often held up as the archetype of crisp,
consistent yet complex grammar and that's thousands of years old.

~~~
thg
> _One thing that has often intrigued me and which I never saw an explanation
> for is why older languages often have more elaborate and complex grammar
> than modern languages, and why English has simplified over time more than
> others._

I can recommend the book _The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of
Mankind 's Greatest Invention_ on that subject. It really can't be answered in
a short summary.

------
scarygliders
Tried to learn Japanese. Gave up after 5 years.

I really did make an effort, signing up to Japanese courses at my local Kumon
(when I lived in Japan), trying lots of different methods (e.g. Rosetta
Stone), but it just wasn't to be.

I'll stick to learning programming languages - those I can relate to.

~~~
cp33
I'm teaching myself Japanese now, and plan to take courses later. I don't even
plan to be super fluent in 5 years, but it's an interesting challenge to do
while I'm not in school anymore. Its hard for me to imagining dropping
something like that after a 5 year commitment.

------
uallo
I highly doubt that learning German and learning Swiss German is actually in
the same category. You essentially have to learn two languages as as Swiss
German is only spoken, the written language is German. And there are many
different dialects in a very small country.

------
MyNameHere
This is probably also skewed toward learners of a certain age. I'm a bit older
than the likely target demo. I can read and write Spanish and German with
proficiency and a little Korean, but I have great difficulty understanding the
spoken languages.

------
darkhorn
Why Turkish is easier than Hungarian? Both are almost same in grammer like
wovel harmony, suffix oriented language etc.

Also, I hear from Turks that learned Japanese and Hungarian that these
languages are easy to learn.

~~~
gnulinux
(Disclaimer: not a linguist, conlanger enthusiast)

Turkish grammar is extremely regular. The only weird/non-regular thing in
Turkish language is its past tenses. Its past tenses are relatively complex
and change suffix based on hear-say, story-telling, context, complaining,
mood, fact etc... Hungarian and Turkish are similar only up to both being
heavily agglutinating (as you know, they're not from the same language
family). And its entirely possible English speakers find Hungarian harder than
Turkish.

Turkish phonology also isn't very complex. Stress is always in the same
syllable. There are two very hard phonemes to pronounce: [ɰ] and [ɯ]. But
overall Hungarian phonology is more sophisticated.

Vowel harmony is very hard to learn. You cannot think about it as you speak,
since it takes a lot of time and is used in every word. It has to be intuitive
to you. So it makes sense that both Hungarian and Turkish are hard languages
to learn.

------
0xcafecafe
I find it surprising that Malayalam is rated less difficult than Hindi. As
speaker of several Indian-aryan languages, Dravidian languages like Malayalam
always seemed more difficult to comprehend.

~~~
half-kh-hacker
There are a few that I thought were surprising, for instance, as a half-
Cambodian person, I was surprised to see that Korean (a language that I am
learning, and have picked up relatively quickly) was ranked _two ranks_ above
Khmer, (my father's native language, with a much more difficult script
compared to Korean, and similar vocabulary difference to Korean.

Furthermore, way more English loanwords exist in modern (South) Korean, so
comprehending sentences is way easier for me in Korean than Khmer, even though
I've only been doing it for about 4-5 months (on-and-off).

------
matt_the_bass
I’m a native English speaker who is moderately fluent in French and German. I
was always lousy at English grammar until I learned German. Then all my
English grammar just maid sense.

------
ekianjo
where is the actual data? how much base size do they have? are the differences
in weeks any significant? without such information this is just another junk
infographic on the web.

------
latchkey
Ha! I'm living in Vietnam now and it is listed as "Usually more difficult than
other languages in the same category." which is a complete understatement!

------
snambi
This is a stupid study.

It depends on the language they are learning.

Suppose a native hindi speaker who knows english is learning bengali, he would
learn bengali faster than a native english speaker.

------
abecedarius
There are Group IV languages like Greek which are Indo-European -- what makes
them harder than Group III, which are all more distant from English?

------
rukuu001
Surprised by Korean being in the hardest category - I've learnt Korean &
Spanish to a similar level, and found them about the same.

~~~
mikesickler
I'm guessing that for Korean it's mostly the grammar differences, honorifics,
and writing system.

~~~
Tehnix
>I'm guessing that for Korean it's mostly the grammar differences, honorifics

Definitely! And some other differences too. As someone living in South Korea
currently, the reading/writing part is trivial, but beyond that it is a lot
harder to learn (for an english speaker (although I'm danish)) than, say,
French.

I definitely disagree that Korean and Spanish would be considered equally
hard, and know literally no one here that would say that either.

~~~
gpetukhov
Maybe that person is the speaker of Arabic. For them, Korean and Spanish
should be equally distant.

------
singularity2001
Icelandic and Greek should be Category I or II? Icelandic is a germanic
language and Greek has many influences on English. At most C3.

~~~
Gupie
Icelandic seemingly has not gone through the process of simplification that
most modern European languages have. It is more like Old Norse.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_language](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_language)

------
ungzd
How "open" this "culture" if it involves anti-adblocker?

------
thewhitetulip
I am curious. How do we say that a language is hard/easy to learn

~~~
Cyph0n
The average time it takes an English learner to reach some level of
proficiency?

~~~
thewhitetulip
Okay. Cool, so we average out based on the students that particular
site/course teaches. But that can't really be the national average right?

Thousands vs millions in the set of students vs those who never applied for
learning.

but yes, we can average it out.

------
stephenr
Can confirm, Thai is a fucking PITA to learn, coming from English.

~~~
wingerlang
What's your strategy? I'm learning as well and I found that learning the
alphabet lays a great foundation.

~~~
stephenr
well to be honeat I don't have one, and I have literally no expectations of
learning to read/write it.

For me it's just learning via immersion.

The tones are the problem for me: kao/kao (white/rice).

Well, and the fact that most people _here_ don't actually speak "properly" \-
they abbreviate everything. "Kob khun krub" becomes a fleeting, almost
doppler-like "karrrb".

I've come to accept that I'll never be fluent, or even conversational in thai.
I can ask for a tank of gas, I can order a coffee or a meal, I can explain
that I don't speak Thai (oh how I understand the situation of non-English
speakers knowing 'I don't speak English' in perfect clear English), etc.

My son will be bilingual, and as he learns I'm sure I'll pick up more too, but
at this point, having seen the struggle of native speakers (one a former
teacher) helping a Thai 7 year old with her homework, I have zero illusions
about how hard this language is, and after taking Japanese at school, I have
zero illusions about my own aptitude for learning other languages.

~~~
wingerlang
For the tones, I recommend this apps section on the tones, after I went
through it (its only one page with all tones next to each other) it clicked
for me. Never really had issues since then.
[https://itunes.apple.com/au/app/walen-
thai/id733242683?mt=8](https://itunes.apple.com/au/app/walen-
thai/id733242683?mt=8)

But I really recommend learning to read. I started with literally learning the
consonants names (ด = 'do dek'). Then things kind of just naturally follows.

Actually I'm on the opposite. Maybe the language is hard, but when you learn
it step by step it feels very easy, since the next piece is just another step.

Most sites wants you to learn "5 consonants, 4 vowels, a few rules, 1 tone" at
first. All this does is to make it more confusing IMO. Just learn all 44
consonants, and once you have them down, learn all vowels. Etc.

------
Accacin
Threads about language on HN always turn into "why my language is harder to
learn than yours". It's all relative, there's more to learning a language than
just learning the words and grammar.

------
qbaqbaqba
I think data from LDS Church would be more interesting.

------
Iwan-Zotow
Where are yellow colored (level III) countries?

------
seppin
Wow Finish harder than Russian. I believe it.

~~~
efficax
Finnish (and Hungarian) are part of their own linguistic group (Finno-Ugric
languages). They both basically have no cognates with the Indo-European
language group (which includes not only the Germanic languages like English
and German but also the Romance languages and languages like Hindi and
Persian, all of which are more similar to each other than they are to Finnish
or Hungarian).

Basically, Finnish and Hungarian are the hardest European languages to learn
for non-native speakers, almost without comparison.

~~~
megaman22
Those two, and Basque, I've wondered a lot about. Hungarian, presumably
deriving from the Huns, goes back to pre-historic Central Asia, possibly as
far east as Mongolia or Siberia. Finish, I'm not as sure of the consensus
provenance. And Basque? Who in the world knows? Possibly some kind of pre-
Celtic holdout, I've seen it posited.

~~~
oblio
Hungarians have nothing to do with Huns. They're Magyars, which was a
different population in Eastern Europe/the Uralic regiom. "Hungarian" itself
does not come from "Hun", the etymology is different. In many countries, such
as mine, it's easier to spot the difference since their name is either Ungur
(notice the missing H) or Maghiar.

The origin of the population is unclear before they were in the Uralic region.

------
Hendrikto
Can people not put stripes, and dots, or something? I cannot for my live read
this map as my color vision is impaired. It‘s frustrating.

------
G4BB3R
Category 0: Esperanto 4-8 weeks

------
koliber
I wonder why having access the sea makes it easier to learn English for north-
western residents of Russia.

------
DaniFong
it takes no time at all to judge a person, why do we think these things?

------
nkkollaw
Those colors are very unintuitive. You'd think that "red" means "more
hours"..?

Weird.

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du_bing
Anyone wants to learn Chinese? I offer personal teaching service of Chinese
for English speakers. I am a native Chinese, and major in English in Zhejiang
University, I am able to help you with Chinese learning. Welcome to contact me
at tarvos21@gmail.com

~~~
du_bing
Seems not very welcomed, anyway, if anyone come to Wuhan, China, welcome to
contact me(my email above), I may be able to show you around here.

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martalist
Japanese is usually more difficult than Cantonese? Really? As an English
native speaker who has learnt some rudimentary Cantonese I find this hard to
believe.

~~~
DonaldFisk
Cantonese is unusual. It's seldom written down. Standard Chinese (i.e. the
written form of Mandarin) is used instead. So there are two comparisons.

Spoken Cantonese + Yale vs. spoken Japanese + Romaji.

Unlike Japanese, Cantonese has a very simple grammar and no registers
(correction: honorifics), so it would be easier to learn to speak.

Spoken Cantonese + Written Chinese vs. spoken Japanese + Kanji + Kana.

Japanese script is less effort to learn, as it uses "only" 2000 Kanji. There's
no such hard limit on the number of Hanzi you need. (But there's the
complication of On-yomi and kun-yomi pronunciations of the same kanji.)

The other issue is the quality and quantity of learning material. Japanese
wins by a country mile.

~~~
martalist
> Unlike Japanese, Cantonese has a very simple grammar and no registers, so it
> would be easier to learn to speak.

Registers being different levels of formality (informal, formal, slang, etc)?
If so, Cantonese has that in spades.

Your answer also ignores the tonal nature of Cantonese/Mandarin. Most guides
can't event agree to how many tones there are. I get by with 7, but it can
range from 6 to 10 depending on who you speak to (in contrast to 4 in
Mandarin).

~~~
megaman22
As an English speaker, the entire concept of tones is more than a little
daunting.

On a lesser scale, the hardest thing about learning German, as, again, an
English speaker, but one who had poor grammar instruction and no grounding in
Latin, the idea of cases for verbs and pronouns was... weird.

~~~
khedoros1
Tones become part of the pronunciation of the word (though it's maddeningly
easy to think of it as separate, with your English-brain saying that they can
be safely ignored).

I've had a bunch of German, and just passing contact with Latin, but a lot of
German grammar started making a lot more sense when I started thinking of
those languages as similar in a sense, because of declension.

~~~
martalist
> Tones become part of the pronunciation of the word

True that. Also, it's just a different use of tone - English uses tone to
differentiate questions from statements, and to otherwise add meaning to
words/sentences. There are other mechanisms for that in Chinese dialects.

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andygawater
There is no way Spain should be listed in the same bracket as
Sweden/Norway/Denmark or Portugal. All these countries have a far greater
portion of the population with good levels of spoken and written English.
Everyone in Spain studies English from the age of about 8 or 9, but about 1 in
100 have anything approaching basic conversational English.

