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Which is the most difficult? | ||
Tags: Difficulty | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| Sprachgenie Decaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5698 days ago 128 posts - 165 votes  Speaks: German*, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Faroese, Icelandic, Flemish, Persian, Swiss-German Studies: English, Belarusian | Message 1 of 11 09 January 2013 at 7:02am | IP Logged | ||
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I'd like to know which would be the most difficult to learn for a monolingual American
for the three groups shown below. Difficulty here pertains to the time and effort required to achieve near-native fluency in reading, speaking, writing, and listening. Please do not include considerations related to the availability of materials. This is about the difficulty of the languages themselves. Thanks for any input. Thai Burmese Cambodian Vietnamese Dutch Danish Norwegian Swedish Portuguese French Greek German 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| renaissancemedi Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Greece Joined 4347 days ago 941 posts - 1309 votes Speaks: Greek*, Ancient Greek*, EnglishC2 Studies: French, Russian, Turkish, Modern Hebrew | Message 2 of 11 09 January 2013 at 8:40am | IP Logged | ||
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I am not a monolingual American, but I think the easiest is the last group. The hardest the first. And the second most difficult, the second group, simply because of the danish, that I find mystifying and impossible to pronounce!
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| Марк Senior Member Russian Federation Joined 5045 days ago 2096 posts - 2972 votes Speaks: Russian* | Message 3 of 11 09 January 2013 at 8:44am | IP Logged | ||
The second group is the easiest, then the last and then the first. 7 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Ogrim Heptaglot Senior Member France Joined 4628 days ago 991 posts - 1896 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Spanish, French, Romansh, German, Italian Studies: Russian, Catalan, Latin, Greek, Romanian | Message 4 of 11 09 January 2013 at 9:27am | IP Logged | ||
Danish pronunciation is pretty mystifying for most Norwegians as well:-) That being said, with regard to grammar and vocabulary I would think Scandinavian languages and Dutch are easier for a monolingual American than the languages in group three. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Raincrowlee Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 6691 days ago 621 posts - 808 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin, Korean, French Studies: Indonesian, Japanese | Message 5 of 11 09 January 2013 at 10:11am | IP Logged | ||
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Yeah, second would be easiest, in part because the languages are all related to English and to each other.
The third would be second, in large part because of Greek, which is quite different from the other three and different from English. The first group would be, by far, the hardest. Four languages pretty much only related by the sprachbund in their region, and all of them pretty far away from English. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Al Diglot Newbie United States Joined 6494 days ago 30 posts - 39 votes Speaks: English*, German | Message 6 of 11 09 January 2013 at 10:16am | IP Logged | ||
Based on FSI and DLI rankings of languages and my own personal experience, I would rank them from easiest to hardest as follows: Dutch Danish Norwegian Swedish Portuguese French Greek German Thai Burmese Cambodian Vietnamese The Germanic languages are closest to English and, thus, the easiest for English speakers to learn. The Romance languages are the next closest. The third group is among the most difficult for English speakers because they are tonal, they feature sounds that don’t exist in English, and all but Vietnamese would require you to learn a new alphabet. Edited by Al on 09 January 2013 at 10:17am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| viedums Hexaglot Senior Member Thailand Joined 4655 days ago 327 posts - 528 votes Speaks: Latvian, English*, German, Mandarin, Thai, French Studies: Vietnamese | Message 7 of 11 10 January 2013 at 9:44am | IP Logged | ||
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Wasn’t the OP asking about relative difficulty within each set? It seems fairly obvious that, say, Vietnamese is more difficult than Dutch for an English native speaker.
I’ll voice my opinion about the Southeast Asian set. First, the problem of learning a different script for each language except Vietnamese shouldn’t be a significant barrier – it’s not like learning Chinese characters. The actual sounds of all of them would pose more problems. Assuming that the learner could handle tones, I’d rank them as follows. (1 being most difficult, 4 least.) 1. Burmese. The sounds of Burmese are quite tricky and hard to differentiate for the learner. At times you may almost long for the clarity of contour tones. Word order is radically different from English (verb-final), unlike the other languages here. There is an array of grammatical particles without an equivalent in the other languages (see Okell and Allott’s Burmese Dictionary of Grammatical Forms for this – nothing like this is necessary for Khmer or Thai.) There is formalized diglossia between the spoken and written varieties. And even within the spoken language, what you actually hear on the street is kind of slurred together and differs from what is presented in textbooks. 2. Vietnamese. Difficult sounds and array of tones, but I feel that learning it wouldn’t be so different from learning a Sinitic language like Mandarin once the learner had the sound system down. 3. Khmer. Difficult sounds, especially vowels. 4. Thai. Tone system is on a par with Mandarin in terms of difficulty. Spelling is regular, but conservative so that words borrowed from Sanskrit contain silent letters and other idiosyncrasies, which can be time-consuming for the learner. Khmer and Thai might be switched here, depending on how much weight you want to give to the difficulty of learning tones. Khmer doesn’t have tones, but it has a lot of strange vowels to compensate for this. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Al Diglot Newbie United States Joined 6494 days ago 30 posts - 39 votes Speaks: English*, German | Message 8 of 11 10 January 2013 at 10:51am | IP Logged | ||
Okay, let’s see… Group 1. I haven’t studied any of the languages in group 1 but FSI says that Vietnamese, Khmer, and Thai are a bit harder than the other “hard languages,” while Burmese is merely “hard.” For whatever that is worth. Group 2. I have studied some Danish and Dutch. I found Dutch easy because it is pretty close to German. For an English speaker without German, I would say that the Scandinavian languages are slightly easier than Dutch because they are a bit closer to English. Among the Scandinavian languages it really depends on which one you start with. I started with Danish so Swedish is a bit harder for me. Group 3. Greek is the hardest by far. German is the second most difficult. FSI says that Portuguese is more difficult than French but I don’t know if I agree. French seems more complicated to me. Edited by Al on 10 January 2013 at 10:53am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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