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A Map Showing How Much Time It Takes English-Speakers to Learn Foreign Languages
- Turing_Machine 9y agoI'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.
- reducesuffering 9y agoEnglish more closely resembles French than any other language I can think of. There’s a lot of overlap in the roots. Edit: I mean, French resembles English more than other languages.
- mc32 9y agoFrisian is a close relative to Eng, but obvs not widely spoken since proper Dutch replaced it completely in schools till recently, where now you can take some classes.
- dboreham 9y agoI'm a native English speaker (well...the Scottish version) and I have pretty strong French, however the place where I felt the people were speaking the closest thing to English I've heard was in The Netherlands.
- ajslater 9y agoScottish is incorrectly labeled on the map. Source: have scottish friends. At least I think they're my friends, hard to tell exactly at times.
- dboreham 9y agoHaha. Yeah everyone is a bit bilingual growing up in Scotland.
- adrianratnapala 9y agoDutch is indeed rather similar to English, especially old English. Especially if you, like me, are more sensitive to grammar than vocab when getting a feel for a language. But English vocab is very Frenchified. It's true that the 100 or so most important words in English are still Germanic, and also that all European languages imported tens of thousands of rare, fancy, words from Greek, Latin and French. But I am talking about the middle-space, those few thousands of common-but-not-ubiquitous words that fill a student's vocab list. In most Germanic languages that stuff is still largely Germanic, but in English it is much more mixed.
- sliverstorm 9y agoSupposedly (I don't know for sure) English inherited mostly Germanic grammar/structure-words, and French verbs & nouns. Seems to be vaguely upheld by Wiki although I can't find my original source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_language_influences_in_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_language_influences_in...
- lottin 9y agoOld English was a Germanic language. Grammar-wise was a lot like modern German or Dutch. However, as English evolved, its grammar was greatly simplified, and nowadays only a few vestigial features of the original declension system remain.
- adrianratnapala 9y agoBut the declension system is not the whole grammar. So while articles don't change much under declension, words like "a" and "the" are familiar to Germans but not to ancient Romans (I don't know about the French). Also the relative order of adjectives and nouns is Germanic. Conjugations, while simplified, still retain much of the old structure, and the set of tenses understood in English is quite Germanic.
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- efficax 9y agoFrench is basically the same as any romance language. It is a little trickier for native English speakers to pronounce than Spanish, but that is really the only difference. Its grammar is basically the same as Spanish, Portugese, Romanian, and it has regular spelling rules and consistent pronounciation rules for the most part. The nasal vowels are tricky for English speakers, but you get the hang of it pretty fast.
- joezydeco 9y agoSpanish has one advantage: nouns come with gender built in. You don't have to memorize it.
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- candeira 9y agoI'm teaching Spanish (my native language) to my daughters and my wife, and I disagree. There are many, many nouns that don't mark the gender except in the accompanying article or adjective.
- 3131s 9y agoAnd some that contradict the rule, i.e. 'agua' among other nouns in certain circumstances: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/agua#Usage_notes https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/agua#Usage_notes
- flatline 9y agoLots of little mnemonics, like man creates el problema, the woman la solution.
- chimeracoder 9y agoThose are both pretty easy, too, because they follow regular rules. "-ma" is always masculine. "-ión" is always feminine.
- maxxxxx 9y agoI think French is closer to English. It's also a little easier to pronounce for English Speakers. German is hard for them.
- dboreham 9y agoEnglish is really a kind of German, just with lots of French/Latin words merged in.
- davidw 9y agoEnglish and German started diverging 1000 years ago, and what they have in common are a smattering of words suited to village life back then. They're really quite different now.
- Udo_Schmitz 9y agoI grew up in northern Germany. Being able to understand Low German helped immensely with learning English.
- dragonwriter 9y agoWell, a Germanic language, but much closer to the other members of the Anglo-Frisian group than it is to German itself.
- simias 9y agoThat's downplaying it slightly. Here's what old english sounded like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CH-_GwoO4xI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CH-_GwoO4xI Even in the written form it's absolutely impossible for me to decipher, it might as well be a completely different language: >HWÆT, WE GAR-DEna in geardagum, >þeodcyninga þrym gefrunon, >hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon! The language evolved so drastically over the past thousand years that his germanic roots are buried pretty deep. Nowadays you're likely to find more cognates in a french text than in a german one. Meanwhile I can find french texts even older than Beowulf and still understand the general gist of it. See for instance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequence_of_Saint_Eulalia#Text https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequence_of_Saint_Eulalia#Text . Even if you don't speak french comparing the original and modernized french version should be enough to convince you of the similarities: >Buona pulcella fut eulalia. (Bonne pucelle fut Eulalie.) >Bel auret corps bellezour anima (Beau avait le corps, belle l’âme.) >Voldrent la veintre li deo Inimi. (Voulurent la vaincre les ennemis de Dieu)
- dmoy 9y agoThe 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)
- thewhitetulip 9y agoYes. I tried learning German for one year while taking breaks and I agree with this. Every single verb has a gender associated with it and to make matters worse, there are exceptions to every single rule! But since German and English are both derived from the same parent language, we can find some similarity. I am from India and ironically, I find learning Japanese easier than learning German/Spanish.
- bipson 9y agoHuh? Our verbs have no gender? Care to explain? What German does though, is a declination of verbs through all cases and times, often irregular, accompanied by gendering pronouns which seems to be the hardest part of German for learner's with native tongue that hasn't these features. The thing is, some think they got it after a few years, but we just let it slip, because it is not required, just feels wrong. We can tell, you've not grown up here.
- Tehnix 9y agoThey probably meant nouns with der/die/das. Probably the thing I hate most in any language, it just seems so incredibly stupid for no benefit (I obviously was not a fan of learning German in primary school). Same with french, but they take it a bit further.
- bipson 9y agoFYI that's the article, in particular "der/die/das" are the definite articles. "Incredibly stupid" sounds a little derogatory. They are not particularly necessary for understanding the language, the correct gender/article for certain nouns are even subject to heated debate between regional dialects, and I agree, if you are coming from a language without these rules it might be hard to grasp/integrate. Nevertheless, I would not go as far as to say they are incredibly stupid. Consider, English also has he/she, him/her, his/hers. You just got rid off the "the"s, AFAIK (or German is the only Germanic language that adopted it from Latin, but I am no linguist). But gender is the easier part, the cases make it difficult: Similar to the English "he/him", we have declination of articles: "einen/einem/eines". This seems terrible for English natives. Together with constructs of "den einen/dem einen/von einem/vom einen/zu einem/auf einen/auf einem", so you need to memorize ways of saying things and at the same time apply the case accordingly. It can make a huge difference in what you are trying to convey. "Von einem ..." is "... of one" (indefinite article), where "Vom einen ..." (Von dem einen) is "... of the one" (dem is the article, einen is actually a counting pronoun, not sure this is the right name).
- IncRnd 9y agoEnglish is a Germanic language. French and Spanish are both romance languages. A knower of one can quickly learn another.
- apolretom 9y agoFrench is harder to pronounce than Spanish, and the irregularity of French spelling makes it even harder. On the other hand, Spanish grammar is quite a bit more complicated than French grammar. In the long run, though, these little differences are insignificant compared to the truly time-consuming part of learning a language: the vocabulary. French and Spanish are about equal in the difficulty of learning vocab.
- cryptonector 9y agoFrench has more conjugations (mostly because it has more subjunctives) than Spanish. Spanish has something like 4k irregular verbs, though most of the irregularities are... regular (there are several common forms of irregularities), so it's not that bad. On the whole I think French is significantly harder to learn than Spanish. English, is very difficult, I think, though obviously not as difficult as, say, Finnish. Most languages have complexity somewhere. Chinese languages have Chinese ideographs. Japanese has Kanji (Chinese characters), two syllabic alphabets, romaji (Latin character set transliteration), and things like "counters" (alternate endings for counting words depending on what sort of thing you're counting -- there are over 1,000 different counters!). The complexity in English mostly lies in all the borrowed words and the rather loose rules around the language (like French, the rules have lots of exceptions, though in French the exceptions to the rules are almost infuriating in number), the rather not-very-phonetic prononciation, the lack of stress marks, the large variation in accents.
- ekianjo 9y agoi dOnt think there are 1000 counters in Japanese, you are clearly exaggerating. when you know about 20 of them its far sufficient for daily situations even if there are more. And romaji is not used much in Japan expect in print media just to look cool or something. Actual articles and posts never use romaji but instead a mix of kanji and kana mostly.
- cryptonector 9y agoWhen I lived in Japan I was told there are over 1,000 counters, and that one's mastery of them is part of how people determine one's level of literacy. Perhaps only about 20 get used all the time. And certainly you can get away with using only the default counter (but you'll sound illiterate). Romaji is also used on signs and other material aimed at foreigners -- Japanese people generally can read romaji because, after all, they are taught English in school. Romaji is not much of a cognitive burden, I agree, since it's very simple, goes along with English, and there's only one romanization.
- nerfhammer 9y agoSpanish may have less complicated grammar but the FSI may think French is easier for native English-speakers in particular because a huge amount of English words are French-derived. That gives you thousands of vocabulary words that you don't need to study very hard to understand. Recall that Normandy conquered England in 1066 and that is where Middle English came from.
- ekianjo 9y agoyou find pretty much the same words That you refer to in French and Spanish because they have both strong latin roots. that should not make a huge difference for an English speaker.
- lottin 9y agoBoth languages come from Latin, but Spanish comes from an older version of Latin and so some innovations that occurred later are not found in Spanish. As an example: "to arrive", "arriver" (French), "arrivare" (Italian), but "llegar" (Spanish).
- nerfhammer 9y agoAgreed, it's not a huge difference. There may be enough of a difference that the FSI may think that the slightly more similar vocabulary more or less makes up for French's slightly more complicated grammar such that it ranks French and Spanish as approximately equal in difficulty for English speakers.
- megaman22 9y agoFrench is easier for me, but I've spent my life adjoining French Canada and studying history from a decidely anglo-french angle.
- pmontra 9y agoI'm Italian and I can read both French and Spanish well. On the surface they look like Italian with different words and different pronunciation. However when I try to write them I appreciate the differences in how the sentences are built. One gets unnatural results trying to write French and Spanish as if they were Italian. English* is definitely* a different* language* even if some words are about the same. I marked* those words with an asterisk* . German is much more different* and difficult*. Computer language metaphor. If you know Ruby you can immediately understand Python but you discover you can't write Python as if it is Ruby. People would laugh at your scripts (and where are all those blocks? Easier the other way around.) You also think you can understand Elixir but this is not really the case. It is difficult to understand Erlang
- booleandilemma 9y agoIs it just a coincidence that the farther out from the UK you go the more weeks it takes to learn the language?
- someemptyspace 9y agoI 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 9y agoAbsent 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 9y agothe 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 9y agoI'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 9y agoThe 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_difficult_rankings_in_europe_according/dpylzbx/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/7dith2/language_di...
- jasonlfunk 9y agoInteresting 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 9y agoIt 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.
- seppin 9y agoWow Finish harder than Russian. I believe it.
- HumanDrivenDev 9y agoI suppose Russian is an Indo-European language which would make it slightly easier for English speakers.
- mc32 9y agoRussian thankfully borrows a bit from Latin and Greek for technical things, so that helps a bit too.
- efficax 9y agoFinnish (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 9y agoThose 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.
- digi_owl 9y agoThis laymans though is that it has come from the sami, as they seem oddly similar in sound. And i have noticed that along the siberian coastline there are peoples that have a culture with surface similarities to the sami.
- martalist 9y agoJapanese is usually more difficult than Cantonese? Really? As an English native speaker who has learnt some rudimentary Cantonese I find this hard to believe.
- cbhl 9y agoJapanese has fewer phonemes than Canto or Mando, which always gave me the impression that it was easier to learn. Maybe the added difficulty comes from needing to understand the grammar (particles) and the different forms of speech for different levels of politeness (after a few years, it now weirds me out when a white dude calls himself 'watashi'). Edit: Actually, if the methodology is "average time spent to learn" another possibility is that the average is slower because the barrier to learning the language is just low enough to attract a bunch of slow learners that wouldn't be interested in Chinese or Korean. (Reminds me of a study where decreasing page weight in KBs increased average page load time because users on the slowest connections were now able to load the page and skewed the average upward.)
- fiblye 9y agoMany, many learners wish Japanese had more available phonemes. One of the biggest problems with Japanese is it imported batches of tens of thousands of Chinese words and forced them into a language with only a fraction of the sound complexity. The result is loads of words with the same pronunciation but completely different meaning. "Shoushin" can mean a work promotion or cowardice. "Shinkou" can mean attack, (military) invasion, progress, encouragement, pickles, or religious faith. None of these usages are rare. If English had half the available consonants and vowels it had now, it'd be far more difficult to learn rather than easy. Japanese has the same problem.
- mikesickler 9y agoWhat's weird about a white dude referring to himself as 'watashi'? I'm a white dude and I have done that plenty of times.
- kirerukaze 9y ago
- xaybey 9y agoThese 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.
- ramblerman 9y ago> 1) Don't expect the same results from self-study with a textbook and some subtitled movies. > 2) Even if you lived there and devoted your entire days to study, it would be difficult to ramp up that quickly. These are 2 wildly different scenarios. If you stay with a family, immerse yourself and go to class every day you would have an advantage over an FSO officer. As to not being professionally fluent in that time, that is definitely true. But you should reach a level where you can be independent enough to get around, speak and understand.
- x0x0 9y agoI think results will vary depending on if you've learned another language before. Having to understand a grammar from the outside is a rough exercise the first time. I'm a native english speaker and conjugating verbs in eg Spanish wasn't hard, but really feeling the difference between the indicative and subjunctive moods takes a lot more work. I found Russian very approachable for a 3rd language. And it's really cool to be able to eg read Pushkin; I can't read Shakespeare without more footnotes than poetry.
- rukuu001 9y agoSurprised by Korean being in the hardest category - I've learnt Korean & Spanish to a similar level, and found them about the same.
- anonova 9y agoReading Korean is surprisingly easy: http://www.ryanestrada.com/learntoreadkoreanin15minutes/ http://www.ryanestrada.com/learntoreadkoreanin15minutes/
- malloryerik 9y agoㅋㅋㅋㅋ yeah, until you need to understand what you've read. Try out any newspaper. Without a day of study, you'll understand an Italian news article better than you will a Korean one after even three years of hard work.
- mikesickler 9y agoI'm guessing that for Korean it's mostly the grammar differences, honorifics, and writing system.
- DonaldFisk 9y agoKorean writing just looks odd, like funny Chinese characters. But it's just an alphabet with letters grouped into syllables.
- 55555 9y agoThe writing system is extremely easy compared to Chinese and Japanese. It's just an alphabet.
- Tehnix 9y ago>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.
- wolf550e 9y agoWhy 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).
- laurentoget 9y agoi suspect because learning hebrew means learning spoken israeli hebrew which is a language that was standardized and revived 150 years ago and has only been spoken since then by less than 10 million people so it did not have time to accumulate weird exceptions like arabic. learning hebrew to be able to understand medieval or biblical literature probably is a good bit harder than learning modern hebrew.
- ars 9y ago> learning hebrew to be able to understand medieval or biblical literature probably is a good bit harder than learning modern hebrew. No it's not. A non-fluent Hebrew speaker would not even be able to tell the difference between the modern and biblical. It's the same words, the same word order, the same letters, pronunciation (modern abbreviates sounds a bit, but the abbreviation is more slang than official - if you ask someone to speak slowly then the pronunciation is the same in both). You'd have to be pretty fluent in Hebrew to even be able to identify where there are differences (mainly in knowing which words are considered archaic, and some sentence structure that is not common in modern Hebrew). But to actually know those details requires a deep knowledge of the language - a beginner speaker would never be able to tell the difference. For all intents and purposes it's all one language. It's not like English where middle English is basically unintelligible. There are tons of people who only ever learned the biblical Hebrew, and they can speak to people who only know modern Hebrew - they sound a bit funny, but that's about it. A beginner speaker would never notice. > so it did not have time to accumulate weird exceptions There's been plenty of time, but it hardly happened for a different reasons: The language is basically defined by the Torah and the Mishnah (and other bodies of work). The way it's written there is definitive. So it's difficult to create exceptions when you have so much written literature that does it in a particular way. A notable exception is uncommon and technical words, which have definitely changed over time - but a beginner is never going to encounter those.
- thewhitetulip 9y agoI am curious. How do we say that a language is hard/easy to learn
- Cyph0n 9y agoThe average time it takes an English learner to reach some level of proficiency?
- thewhitetulip 9y agoOkay. 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.
- khedoros1 9y agoFor a few of examples: Two languages with some shared history will have a lot of words from similar roots. That makes the vocabulary of the new language easier to learn. If the grammar is similar, it takes less practice to get used to the word order. If the grammar of the new language is more regular, it means fewer special cases to remember. And obviously, things will be easier if you don't have to learn a new writing system, or if the writing system is quick to learn.
- learc83 9y agoThe FSI, which is where this chart comes from rates languages based on how long it takes them to teach the language to their (native English speaking) students on average.
- koopuluri 9y agoI'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 9y agoYes, 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 9y agoI 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.
- GolDDranks 9y agoThis 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 9y agoWhat makes me skeptical, is they rate Arabic as much more difficult than Hebrew, two languages with some mutual intelligibility.
- TomK32 9y agoDo they include the script? I bet the Hebrew script is much easier to learn than the Arabic.
- dirktheman 9y agoThey're about the same. To the untrained eye, Arabic looks like a lot of scribbles while with the Hebrew script it's easy to distinguish separate letters. That would make you think it's easier to learn Hebrew. In reality there are a lot of similarities between the two languages (they're both Semitic), not just in vocabulary but also in grammar. Arabic may have a different way of writing the same letters, but if you study Arabic for a while it's not so hard to distinguish between the separate letters.
- du_bing 9y agoAnyone 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 9y agoSeems 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.
- Veratyr 9y agoWhy 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_difficult_rankings_in_europe_according/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/7dith2/language_di...
- SyneRyder 9y agoYou'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
- Ixio 9y agoThe map was interesting but it just got me wanting the whole list which is on the openculture post but not on the reddit link. So I think it adds more than just "blogspam" to the original source (but probably not much except for the list).
- leke 9y agoFinnish 834+ weeks for me.
- jason_slack 9y agoI 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.
- KennyCason 9y agoI 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)
- c3534l 9y agoAs an American, I can say that it takes at least two weeks in Ireland before you can understand a damned thing they say.
- LoSboccacc 9y agoI've see a drunken guy from Wicklow talk to some more drunken guy from Dublin north, they were talking about two completely different things but the conversation moved forward anyway. At some point I started just talking back in slow but loud italian, and it made no difference in the world.
- patrickk 9y agoIt'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 9y agoThe 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.
- rimliu 9y agoQuite common problem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-mOy8VUEBk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-mOy8VUEBk
- Supernaut 9y agoI'm honestly curious as to what parts of the country you've been spending your time in? I'm Irish born and bred and I can assure you, no American that I've ever conversed with has had the slightest difficulty in understanding me!
- c3534l 9y ago
- DaniFong 9y agoit takes no time at all to judge a person, why do we think these things?
- ekianjo 9y agowhere 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.
- sguav 9y agoCan't stop thinking of that `concidered` in the top image...
- loopbit 9y agoMe 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
- hellofunk 9y agoI'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.
- lui8906 9y agoDutch is a combination of German and English, my Dutch friends tell me. German is a tough language to learn. The grammar diverges from English significantly. I'm using the source as myself since I've been learning for the last 2 years. I've also learned some basic Spanish and Portuguese, I found them easier to pick up. I've heard it's possible to have some fluency in Spanish in 3 - 6 months. I think it would be very difficult to achieve this in Germany. In the end it depends on the learner as well. My experience learning languages is that it's hard no matter what!
- vidarh 9y agoIf you want to really see how close the relationship between the Germanic languages are, line up some sentences German, Norwegian (or Danish or Swedish), Dutch, English, Icelandic next to each other, and then a second group with Middle High German, Norse (for the modern Scandinavian languages), Old Dutch, Middle English, Icelandic. Basically if you pick up any modern pair, you get a ton for free. Pick up a third, or even just learn a decent amount about one, and you start picking up a lot of patterns that lets you infer meanings. If any of the modern pairs includes Icelandic, you'll benefit strongly from knowing the older versions of the other one in the pair... Learn the patterns of how newer forms of your own language derive from the older, and you'll find you'll start being able to "shift down, sideways and back up" very often. E.g. Dutch or German sch => sk in the Scandinavian languages. "u" in middle of a word => "o". Hence "Schule" => "skole" (school). There's dozens of simple transliteration rules like that. In terms of older forms, an example from Norwegian that illustrates the closer relationships, that I'm particularly fond of because it's an oddity, is "vel bekomme". It is a pleasantry that basically means "you're welcome" specifically used after a meal. It's a fun one because while "vel" ("well") is still used in modern Norwegian in many contexts, including in e.g. "velkommen" (welcome), "bekomme" now doesn't even figure in most dictionaries on it's own, and some younger Norwegians would struggle to explain what the word means on its own (I'm 42, and my generation too rarely used it separate from the phrase "vel bekomme", but were quite likely to hear it in somewhat wider use in our childhood) But it's the same word as German "bekommen" one of the meanings of which is for food to "agree" with you, and with etymology that converges with the etymology of English "become". Which sounds weird until you deconstruct both into roughly a mix of "to take on" (characteristics of), "to receive" (well). The fun thing is that when directly transliterating the words into the closest German/Dutch cognates, it's not perfect, but it's close enough that if you know the history of the words, it's becomes obvious in context. At which point the other (archaic; you may still find old people use it, but even that is becoming rare) Norwegian use makes sense: "Det bekommer Dem" => literally "it becomes you" (in the meaning "it suits you") For some younger Norwegian speakers, that latter Norwegian phrase is now so unusual that it's sometimes first when they learn German or learn the English phrase that the meaning fully "clicks".
- cluoma 9y agoSomething 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 9y agoI 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
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- peoplewindow 9y agoGerman 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.
- Accacin 9y agoThreads 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.
- koliber 9y agoI wonder why having access the sea makes it easier to learn English for north-western residents of Russia.
- jernfrost 9y agoIn 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.
- madisfun 9y agoThe 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.
- wastedhours 9y agoThat was my first thought, I'm currently learning one coloured in red, and looked at the map and thought "oh *". Really interesting to hear the approaches to learning, currently going through Duolingo which is helping with vocab, but don't think it's going to help at all with proper conversation.
- erk__ 9y agoThe colours are also a poor choice for people who are colourblind.
- gregoire 9y agoIndeed, 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-maps-edition https://speakerdeck.com/cherdarchuk/data-looks-better-naked-...
- wruza 9y agoI think they choose red..violet color spectrum as a base for easy..hard axis. Doesn’t explain light red though. Anyway, it is unusual and very hard to read.
- Fummy 9y agoI made the map and chose it that way just because I associate germanic languages and english with the colour red. I changed it in a later version. https://imgur.com/gallery/37xlzKE https://imgur.com/gallery/37xlzKE
- sytelus 9y agoSo 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.
- darkhorn 9y agoWhy 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 9y ago(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.
- ThinkingGuy 9y agoI can see how Japanese would be easier for a Turkish speaker than for an English speaker- Turkish and Japanese have similar word order (verb tends to come at the end of the sentence).
- tehwalrus 9y agoLots 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 9y ago> 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.
- tehwalrus 9y agoAaand a glaring hole in my ability to evaluate language learning techniques is revealed to me: I can't actually speak any of the languages in his examples. Well, at least I mentioned Ms Lomb as well!
- emtel 9y agoI 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.
- latchkey 9y agoHa! 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!
- littlestymaar 9y agoFun 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. :(
- akvadrako 9y agoToo 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.
- scarygliders 9y agoTried 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 9y agoI'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.
- singularity2001 9y agoIcelandic and Greek should be Category I or II? Icelandic is a germanic language and Greek has many influences on English. At most C3.
- Gupie 9y agoIcelandic 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
- nkkollaw 9y agoThose colors are very unintuitive. You'd think that "red" means "more hours"..? Weird.
- andygawater 9y agoThere 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.
- Hendrikto 9y agoCan 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.
- stephenr 9y agoCan confirm, Thai is a fucking PITA to learn, coming from English.
- wingerlang 9y agoWhat's your strategy? I'm learning as well and I found that learning the alphabet lays a great foundation.
- stephenr 9y agowell 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 9y agoFor 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.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- rurban 9y agoThis 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 9y ago> 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 9y agoNope, 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.
- 0xcafecafe 9y agoI 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 9y agoThere 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).
- contingencies 9y agoPeople 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!
- JepZ 9y agoAs 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).
- matt_the_bass 9y agoI’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.
- woodpanel 9y agoAs 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)?
- andrewbinstock 9y agoSurely, the grammar.
- mirceal 9y agohaha. no. grammar for some of the latin-based languages is ridiculously hard to master. you have trouble with the grammar even as a native speaker. It's not the grammar.
- Florin_Andrei 9y agoSpeaking as someone who learned French in school, I agree. Goddamn plus-que-parfait, it's a trap.
- ternaryoperator 9y agoWhat's the difficulty? The pluperfect is one of the easier tenses in French. Its formation has no exceptions--one of the very rare tenses in French with no exceptions: imperfect + past participle. And its usage directly parallels the pluperfect in English: I had finished my meal when he arrived. J'avais fini mon repas quand il est arrivé.
- jccalhoun 9y agoI took German in high school and as a summer class in grad school to meet the language requirement and have taken it on duolingo. I didn't find the grammar particularly hard once you learn the differences. Capitalizing all nouns makes it easy to identify them and learning verb endings makes it easy to identify verbs in many cases. What is hard for me is the vocabulary. If I haven't memorized it then I usually can't guess its meaning.
- squarefoot 9y agoThis 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.
- JoeAltmaier 9y agoThat's surely half of it. The other half is culture, correlated with language if not directly influenced by it.
- sreyaNotfilc 9y agoIts a classic mob/tribal way of life. If you show a difference from the majority, then the majority may have a tough time integrating with you. And, why would they want to really? Learning a language is a daunting task. Yeah, you can do it, but its more than just learning words. Its about discovering a whole new culture, and that takes a lot of energy. Its a complex issue. We all have our daily lives. Good things and bad things happens to our culture, associates, friends, family everyday. Its hard for a person to want to take on any more challenges. On my end, I am learning Korean. Partly because they are a big focus point of (potential) conflict to our culture. Partly because I want to watch Korean Dramas without reading sub-titles. I'm about 7 weeks in, and I feel drained trying to learn the language. Still gonna power through for the greater good. TLDR; The world could be a better place, especially from learning another culture. I'm learning Korean currently. Its hard, but I want to really know more about them. Most other don't have the time because ... well, umm.. "have you seen the latest Bitcoin price!!!??"
- dbatten 9y ago
- glorkk 9y agoI 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.
- MyNameHere 9y agoThis 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.
- WhitneyLand 9y agoWarning: 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.
- wallflower 9y agoIf 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 9y agoConversely I only really started to learn english after watching american standups and british comedy. Maybe thats more a motivational thing though
- ungzd 9y agoHow "open" this "culture" if it involves anti-adblocker?
- rnikander 9y agoI 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 9y agoDo 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 9y agoRussian 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.
- tigershark 9y agoYou can't possibly count the feminine form, the singular and plural and the verbs conjugation as different forms. Otherwise even Italian would be pretty much impossible from this point of view. For example "the lawyer ate" in Italian becomes: L'avvocato/l'avvocatessa/gli avvocati/le avvocatesse combined with mangiò/mangiarono/ha mangiato/hanno mangiato/mangiava/mangiavano/ebbe mangiato/ebbero mangiato. It's a complete non-sense to count the different "forms" in this way. This example has 32 different combinations using the same principles. But I would never say that Italian is more difficult than Russian. The difficult part in Russian is the 6 cases (I remembered incorrectly 5).
- pvaldes 9y agoSpanish 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.
- BuckRogers 9y agoLanguage 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.
- G4BB3R 9y agoCategory 0: Esperanto 4-8 weeks
- creep 9y agoI 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.
- eric-hu 9y agoI'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 9y agoI'm Thai and can confirm. Words with five different intonations can have totally different meanings.
- Fummy 9y agoAnyone 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_difficult_rankings_in_europe_according/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/7ewn04/language_di... https://imgur.com/gallery/oFbTauc https://imgur.com/gallery/oFbTauc these are the final versions.
- snambi 9y agoThis 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.
- uallo 9y agoI 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.
- XR0CSWV3h3kZWg 9y agoAs 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.
- qbaqbaqba 9y agoI think data from LDS Church would be more interesting.
- abecedarius 9y agoThere are Group IV languages like Greek which are Indo-European -- what makes them harder than Group III, which are all more distant from English?
- Iwan-Zotow 9y agoWhere are yellow colored (level III) countries?