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The State Department has long experience with teaching employees a working capacity in other languages. [1] is the summary of it. Obviously, "native English-sp
by AlbertCory 4y ago
The State Department has long experience with teaching employees a working capacity in other languages. [1] is the summary of it.
Obviously, "native English-speaking" is assumed, so the time for a Mandarin speaker to learn Swahili or vice versa is not considered. This isn't really "complexity" in a universal sense.
It would be interesting to see a similar chart from the Chinese foreign service's language institute (I assume they must have one). Or the Egyptian one.
[1] https://www.atlasandboots.com/travel-blog/foreign-service-institute-language-difficulty/ https://www.atlasandboots.com/travel-blog/foreign-service-in...
- rawgabbit 4y agoIt’s interesting the site says Vietnamese takes 44 weeks versus 88 weeks for Korean. I assume it’s because Vietnamese has a western alphabet. But I thought Vietnamese pronunciation was more difficult due to tones.
- AlbertCory 4y agoNo idea. But at least this is empirical data from a lot of samples. What if we had the results of learning difficulty for native speakers of all the major languages, and some languages were hard for everyone? In principle, this is an experiment that's doable, if the foreign ministries of the other countries also publish this data.