5 ms·
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 credibil
by GolDDranks 9y ago
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 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.
- dang 9y agoI 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.
- ekianjo 9y agomodern hebrew is an invented languages that dates from one century ago if I remember correctly so not sure how much similarity to Arabic can be claimed.
- reuven 9y agoModern Hebrew is indeed about a century old. But a huge proportion of its vocabulary and grammar and based on the Bible, and many centuries of Jewish religious and legal writing. Don't forget that for 2,000 years, Jews have prayed, studied, written, and communicated in Hebrew. It's easier for a native Hebrew speaker to read the Bible or rabbinic literature than for a native English speaker to read Shakespeare. Moreover, a good grounding in Biblical and rabbinic Hebrew grammar and vocabulary makes modern Hebrew far easier to understand. To say that modern Hebrew is "made up" exaggerates the degree to which Hebrew exists on a continuum. It was revived as a spoken, day-to-day language used for non-religious, non-legal affairs. But there are more than 2,000 years of Hebrew documents out there, and they contribute massively to everything from idioms to grammar to vocabulary -- along with many modern terms from English, Russian, French, Arabic, and other languages.
- Broken_Hippo 9y agoI was thinking arabic had crazy strict grammar rules that hebrew doesn't have. That makes learning the language harder.
- icc97 9y agoThere's also no mention of numbers. The sample size for this is going to be very small. Plus I agree that the definition of 'speaking' a language is wildly open. It took me 3 years of living in Belgium and 18 months of 3 hours a week lessons to get to a point where it made more sense to have conversations in Dutch than English.