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Difficulty levels of most European languages for Americans
- 082349872349872 2y agomore (global) languages, no ads: https://www.state.gov/foreign-language-training/#:~:text=The%20following%20language,in%20the%20language https://www.state.gov/foreign-language-training/#:~:text=The...
- gedy 2y agoMy personal observation on this is, while Vietnamese is listed as a hard language for English due to differences, I found it's actually a pretty simple language beyond the non-European pronunciation. Grammar sounds like: You want eat what? I'm hungry very. You go no? etc. I had an easier time learning that than German for example.
- Detrytus 2y agoFunny comparison, since that's exactly how English itself sounds to speakers of German, French, or Slavic languages. English has almost no grammar, words do not change their forms, endings, almost everything is coded by word order, and sometimes by extra "operator" words.
- gedy 2y agoGood observation, I only speak English otherwise and found it pretty easy to come by.
- ghaff 2y agoI suspect that there's a difference between what it takes to properly learn a language in school and do well on tests and what it takes to functionally communicate at the street level.
- notahacker 2y agoDoesn't speaking Vietnamese properly involve mastery of tones and a complex system of pronouns/honorifics where you have to figure out the appropriate age/familiarity level which might be more challenging than the actual words? The main difficulty with learning German is that you tend to get replies in immaculate English
- madcaptenor 2y agoInterestingly, there are two tiers within Category I, which isn't reflected on the map: - Danish, Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish, Italian, Romanian - 24 weeks - French, Spanish - 30 weeks
- itronitron 2y agoI think the hardest aspect of learning German as an American from native German speaking instructors is due to the manner in which the language is taught. One part of this is the assumption that Americans have some/any familiarity with the language, and that is simply wrong. We are simply not exposed to the German language at all, for obvious reasons. Tangent >> it's also funny how Austria is coded as a Category 3 language while Germany is Category 2 :o
- paleotrope 2y agoAmericans aren't even familiar with English.
- pavlov 2y agoOne should avoid feeling schadenfreude about how the German language is completely missing from the American zeitgeist.
- madcaptenor 2y agoGo have a hamburger and a lager instead.
- The_Colonel 2y ago> it's also funny how Austria is coded as a Category 3 language while Germany is Category 2 :o Honestly, I'm not surprised. German Austrian dialects are quite strong, omnipresent and difficult to learn (few resources apart from going in the streets).
- rightbyte 2y agoThen why didn't Switzerland get the Austria treatment? The map or stats are probably just wrong.
- ghaff 2y agoI suppose it depends what language you're even using for Switzerland. I can handle the French in Switzerland more or less the same as I can handle French anywhere else (not that great), German and Italian not well at all, and Romansh pretty much non-existently.
- Savageman 2y agoGreen is harder and red is easier? Strange choice of colors.
- blakesterz 2y agoI'm not sure I would've even noticed it if you hadn't pointed that out, I'd expect red is harder too.
- voidr 2y agoI was very confused when I saw that Hungarian is easy and Romanian is hard, then I read the legend.
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- labster 2y agoIf you’re red-green colorblind both language groups are equally hard.
- sandspar 2y agoOne thing to keep in mind is that these lists conflate difficulty with time. If you like Chinese, learning Chinese isn't difficult - it's fun. It just takes a while. If you find Spanish dull, then learning Spanish is difficult, even though it would hypothetically take less time to learn.
- tomcar288 2y agofor chinese, if you're not capable of recognizing those sounds reliable, it won't just be really hard, it'll be completely impossible. even if every word spoken is one you already know, if your hearing can't distinguish it, then you don't have a chance.
- rightbyte 2y agoDunno how Romanic languages could be considered easier to learn than German for English-speakers. Or why Austrian German would be harder than German. The stats is probably mainly a vague map of mother tongue languages of the employees. It probably does not take many to shift the stats a lot.
- ghaff 2y agoThere's probably comprehensibility and fluency--which aren't necessarily the same thing. As a native English speaker, it seems natural that Romance languages are easier than German--probably because of German grammar complexity. Dutch is something of an outlier there just because it's so relatively close to English though I have no real personal experience.
- xhevahir 2y agoIn my experience it's the vocabulary. Sometimes it feels like for every word like "Hand" that's easy to recognize there's a dozen like "Ausbildung" that aren't. (For comparison, the French word for Ausbildung is "éducation.")
- notahacker 2y agoThe Latin language borrowings tend to be closer to the European versions orthographically, to the point where you can understand the general intent of a lot of notices even without speaking a word. Common German words like Leben and Mutter and Fuß might be derived from the same root as English words but you'd never guess based on how much evolution has happened in the language since. Conversely a lot of English words are so close to Romance language equivalents that if you're struggling for vocabulary there's a decent sized chance that an approximately similar Latin-derived English word with local pronunciation (and appropriate conjugation) will be understood.
- achates 2y agoI found German noun declensions a pain to learn and you basically just have to memorize the gender of each noun. Spanish grammar is simpler in comparison and the -a vs -o ending tells you the gender of most nouns. Also, like the article mentions, English has just as many words with Latin roots as it does Germanic.
- pavlov 2y agoRussian is much easier for English speakers to learn than Finnish or Estonian, yet they’re in the same category on this map. It doesn’t seem like a very useful ranking, at least for the smaller national languages.
- bovermyer 2y agoYeah, my attempts to learn Estonian met with roughly the same success as my attempts to learn Latin. Japanese was easier. German too. Spanish was much easier.
- yborg 2y agoYou have to learn a new alphabet for Russian. This is also one of the reasons for the high difficulty classification of the Asian languages that have their own scripts.
- hagbard_c 2y agoTo find out how difficult it will be to learn a script just have a look at mechanical typewriters used for those scripts: Russian/Ukrainian: [1] Greek: [2] Chinese: [3] Learning Cyrillic or Greek or Asian phonetic scripts like Katakana or Hangul is not that difficult since they are conceptually similar to Latin script. Learning ideographic scripts like those used in China or Japan (Kanji) is another story. [1] https://www.mrmrsvintagetypewriters.com/cdn/shop/files/DSC_3844_00d4b9be-a64b-4a30-8015-f14cb64178f4.jpg?v=1699204139 https://www.mrmrsvintagetypewriters.com/cdn/shop/files/DSC_3... [2] https://www.mrmrsvintagetypewriters.com/cdn/shop/products/DSC_0104_7e35d634-0fd4-4f1d-83df-67c7a5e1d44e.JPG?v=1556608265 https://www.mrmrsvintagetypewriters.com/cdn/shop/products/DS... [3] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9c/Chinese_typewriter.jpg/1280px-Chinese_typewriter.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9c/Ch...
- rbren 2y agoHungarian deserves its own color
- dcotter 2y agoI was looking for Hungarian and didn't see it, unfortunately. I learned a smattering of it some twenty years ago in a study abroad. I remember it was difficult, but fun, to learn. Three things made it difficult, as I remember: one, it is agglutinative, so you get strings of suffixes on the ends of nouns, verbs, etc.; two, it has zero overlap with English vocabulary, or even the Romantic & Germanic ancestors of English; three, vowel harmonizing takes a bit of practice. None of these is particularly demanding, but they have no equivalents in English. But a very aesthetically satisfying language once you get the hang of it.
- tomcar288 2y agoi've spent a considerable amount of time trying to learn mandarin. I can tell you there's far less sound diversity in mandarin. sound recognition is incredibly hard for that language for english speakers. everything sounds the same and even the four tones can be difficult to differentiate between. what makes it even harder is all the words and grammar that's left out, that the listener is forced to determine everything from context which makes it even harder if you didn't recognize a few of the words.
- helaoban 2y agoFor what definition of professional or proficiency does one achieve "general professional proficiency" in French in 24 weeks...
- coev 2y agoProficient enough for a diplomat to go to the host country and not cause an international incident.
- austinl 2y agoThe Foreign Service Institute training is also full-time, 8+ hours a day, working with dedicated tutors in small groups. Basically, it's your job to learn the language.
- ghaff 2y agoThis isn't taking a semester of high school language instruction or playing with Duolingo for six months. It's basically doing nothing else during working hours and maybe homework for over half a year in what would have probably been close to a $100K crash course.
- pessimizer 2y agoThey mean 24 weeks in a residential, 24 hour a day program, where you sign an oath never to speak in anything but the target language, and which is largely attended by people in the armed forces whose career will be affected by their performance. The level is probably about B2/C1, and they expect these people to immediately go to work in the language. English shares a lot of vocabulary with French, so that's a lot less for English speakers to learn.
- sn9 2y agoThese are the estimates for how long it takes to reach the FSI "Speaking 3: General Proficiency in Speaking (S3)" and "Reading 3: General Professional Proficiency in Reading (R3)", which I understand to mean roughly B2 in the CEFR scale.
- austinl 2y agoI've honestly found German to be easier than French, specifically in terms of listening comprehension. It can take a while to get used to word order in German, but I've found it much easier to pick out discrete words compared to French. Maybe it's because elision is so common in French? e.g. "j’aime l’hiver". I find it hard to decouple those things quickly enough in my head. Most words in German, on the other hand, are spelled exactly as they are pronounced. Curious if folks have had other experiences with these two languages.
- jakevoytko 2y agoThis was my experience too. I haven't taken German in 20 years but I can still understand some things tourists say. I studied French 5 years ago with the help of my wife (fluent in French, professional translator) and even doing hours of listening practice daily for months I never got the hang of more than extremely simple phrases. So much is a near-homophone to my American ears. Oddly, French people understood my French much easier than Germans understood my German. My guess was that I nailed the French grammar but struggled more with the German grammar.
- ghaff 2y agoOne of the funny things with French is what a sometimes traveling companion sometimes says to me with some exasperation: "They don't pronounce half their letters!" :-) Also makes me realize that, bad as my French is, I knew the language a lot more than they did.
- BrandoElFollito 2y agoI would venture that we do not pronounce more than that. "Waters" is "eaux" which is the same sound as "o". Mot is mo Phrase is fraz Maison is mezo (almost) It would actually be interesting to compute that, possibly by kind of words (verbs, nouns, ...) and prominence.
- vundercind 2y agoI’ve found French accents and speaking styles to play a large role in how well I can understand spoken French. African and Levantine French speakers are often easier for me to understand than, say, Parisians. I do find Spanish to have been much easier to develop an ear for than French (I’ve put in far less effort, but can differentiate words about as well) and also for whatever reason I found gaining a sense for noun gender to be extremely easy for Spanish but nearly impossible for French. I can guess and be right the vast majority of the time in Spanish, while in French it often feels like I’m doing worse than 50/50. It doesn’t help that it can be challenging to practice it in isolation, due to how articles work in French. Only way to drill gender effectively is in context, hard to quickly build, say, an Anki deck for it.
- iamcreasy 2y agoIt would be cool if there is a similar study for those who learned English as second language. I understand it is difficult endeavor because the study needs to be replicated for every major languages out there.
- jimbokun 2y ago> Considering all that effort, why would an English-speaker—even a diplomat—learn another language? Doesn’t everybody else speak English anyway? Everybody else speaking English, means they can communicate with you, if they want to. It doesn't mean you can follow along with conversation at a party or social event or work environment. You will often be left out of the loop, even if not intentionally.
- ghaff 2y agoYeah. It's a cost of doing business (of whatever sort in a country that isn't predominantly English-speaking). Either expend the considerable energy or time or do something else.
- avmich 2y agoIn not too polite https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAjVZXpQToI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAjVZXpQToI starting from 48 second there's an illustration of how English could create communication problems to English speakers.
- ranger_danger 2y agoWhy are there no names on the country map? I don't know what's what.
- BrandoElFollito 2y agoI was about to comment that the qualification is insane when I realized that red is green and green is red.