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Languages ranked by learning materials? | ||
Tags: Language Program | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| jaliyah Newbie United States Joined 5117 days ago 20 posts - 22 votes | Message 1 of 26 17 July 2012 at 11:14am | IP Logged | ||
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Which languages have the greatest quality and quantity of learning materials for native English speakers to learn them?
Does anyone know of a ranking list? I mean obviously, major languages like French and Spanish would head up such a list, and lesser ones like Persian or Indonesian would be further down, but I'd love to see a comprehensive list ranking languages this way... Anyone know? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| DaraghM Diglot Senior Member Ireland Joined 6143 days ago 1947 posts - 2923 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French, Russian, Hungarian | Message 2 of 26 17 July 2012 at 3:40pm | IP Logged | ||
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In Ireland, the following are the dominant language learning materials. As most of the materials are published abroad, it might also closely reflect the United Kingdom, with the exception of the placing of Irish.
1. French 2. Irish 3. Spanish 4. German 5. Italian\Japanese 6. Portuguese 7. Polish\Mandarin 8. Russian 9. Dutch\Arabic 10. Swedish [EDIT - Reranked some languages to include others] Edited by DaraghM on 17 July 2012 at 3:50pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6589 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 3 of 26 17 July 2012 at 4:27pm | IP Logged | ||
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Really, more resources for Polish than for Russian? I'm pretty sure that in general there's a lot more stuff for Russian, although it might be more difficult to get at a physical store depending on the location.
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| DaraghM Diglot Senior Member Ireland Joined 6143 days ago 1947 posts - 2923 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French, Russian, Hungarian | Message 4 of 26 17 July 2012 at 4:55pm | IP Logged | ||
In the past couple of years, the amount of Polish learning material in Ireland, has increased dramatically. I was hoping it would see a matching increase in Russian material, but this hasn't manifested itself. Overall, there is probably more material in English for students of Russian, but this hasn't been reflected in Irish bookshops. Polish is now the dominant Slavic language here. Edited by DaraghM on 17 July 2012 at 4:56pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6901 days ago 4250 posts - 5711 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 5 of 26 17 July 2012 at 4:57pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'm surprised to find Swedish on the list, not that I have any better suggestion. (Hindi? Bengali? Thai? Urdu?) Edited by jeff_lindqvist on 17 July 2012 at 7:28pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7148 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 6 of 26 19 July 2012 at 5:48pm | IP Logged | ||
An imperfect and Eurocentric start can be in this list from European Language Learning Materials Survey. Consolidated Report. January - December 2000 To make a very rough guide, I picked languages sequentially with at least 20 million native speakers from a list of languages ranked by number of native speakers and then ran searches with "[insert language here] language instruction" in Amazon.com and came up with the following: Spanish (3255 results) French (2853 results) German (2137 results) Italian (1355 results) Chinese (mainly Mandarin?) (1262 results) Arabic (1077 results) Russian (941 results) Japanese (849 results) Polish (589 results) Portuguese (577 results) Korean (381 results) Persian (299 results) (Farsi (111 results)) Hindi-Urdu (166 + 124 = 290 results) Turkish (285 results) Vietnamese (273 results) Dutch (209 results) Malay-Indonesian (78 + 114 = 192 results) Ukrainian (136 results) Thai (111 results) Pashto (81 results) Punjabi (80 results) Romanian (68 results) Tagalog (63 results) (Filipino (17 results)) Tamil (30 results) Bengali (20 results) Gujarati (15 results) Burmese (12 results) Marathi (11 results) Telugu (11 results) Malayalam (10 results) Hausa (8 results) Uzbek (6 results) Kannada (5 results) Oriya (3 results) Languages which had no results or the results were effectively irrelevant. Awadhi (0 result) Azerbaijani (2 results*) Bohjpuri (1 result*) Gan (4 results*) Hakka (2 results*) Hunanese (0 result) Javanese (4 results*) Maithili (0 result) Marwari (0 result) Rajasthani (0 result) Sindhi (6 results*) Sundanese (0 result) Wu (14 results*) some of the "popular smaller" languages (i.e. < 20 million native speakers but "popular" on the forum) Hebrew (611 results) Greek (405 results) Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (3 + 84 + 35 = 132 results) Afrikaans (124 results) Swedish (124 results) Hungarian (116 results) Czech (100 results) Norwegian (96 results) Albanian (64 results) Danish (53 results) Finnish (44 results) Armenian (41 results) Haitian Creole (41 results) Bulgarian (32 results) Kurdish (30 results) Slovak (27 results) Catalan (24 results) Khmer (17 results) Icelandic (12 results) Georgian (11 results) Mongolian (10 results) Zulu (7 results) Esperanto (6 results) Guaraní (1 result*) Note: This is quite imperfect because my search was in Amazon.com and always used the phrase "[insert language of your choice] language instruction". No doubt that I could get different set of results if I had used for example "[insert language of your choice] language" instead, and/or expanded my search beyond Amazon.com My tentative conclusion from this exercise is that it's childishly easy for the native speaker of English to find learning material for Arabic, Chinese (especially Mandarin), French, German, Italian, Japanese, Russian, and Spanish (incidentally these are languages that excite me very little, if at all). Looking for stuff for Greek, Hebrew, Polish and Portuguese wouldn't be that hard either. Outside all of those languages, looking for things can be a bit tougher. 16 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| druckfehler Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4860 days ago 1181 posts - 1912 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Korean Studies: Persian | Message 7 of 26 19 July 2012 at 8:21pm | IP Logged | ||
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I would be especially interested in which languages have the most free learning materials available on the internet. There's a lot for Mandarin and Korean - in fact, I think it would be possible to study those languages without buying a single book/language course.
I wonder if that's because they have a reputation for being very difficult languages, as there's a lot of material made available by universities and language students who want to help with this challenge... But maybe its similar for other languages and I'm just not so aware of it, because I'm not focusing on them. For European Portuguese, Hebrew and Persian I have found much less, though. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Gorgoll2 Senior Member Brazil veritassword.blogspo Joined 5138 days ago 159 posts - 192 votes Speaks: Portuguese* | Message 8 of 26 19 July 2012 at 8:26pm | IP Logged | ||
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@Serpent: I guess I realize why is Polish so common: There´s strong Polish immigration
to Ireland. At Brazil, I would give a ranking: 1-English - Obviously 2-Spanish - It´s quite closed to Portuguese and is spoken at the neighbouring countries. 3-French - It was eidely spokem among the elites, being a former lingua franca 4-Italian - There is a large community and many Southeatern and Southern Brazilian have Italian citizenship. 5-German - German isn´t so popular here because, it´s not a very near language. 6-Japanese - Brazil has the largest Japanese colony in the World. Anime, Manga and technology gave new reasons to learn it. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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