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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 5135 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes  Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe | Message 9 of 29 01 January 2011 at 3:09pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I recently saw a blog post talking about this. - http://robertlindsay.wordpress.com/2009/12/01/more-on-the-ha rdest-languages-to-learn/
That particular post talks about Indo-European languages, but he has another that deals with Non-Indo-European languages. He rates them on a scale of 1-5 though. Going on the languages I'm studying, I think he's pretty accurate. I should note that it's based on a native English speaker's perspective, though. R. == Edited by hrhenry on 01 January 2011 at 3:19pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6708 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 10 of 29 01 January 2011 at 4:40pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I'm sure the honorable topic starter leosmith is aware of the problems and that he just asks us to quote numbers to avoid cantankerous people like me from blurring the grand picture. But it can't be done. No way.
The subjective difficulty of a language depends on what languages you already know, which sources you have got, your goals and the amount of time and effort you can give to it. And giving a number without taking those things into consideration is meaningless. So I make some comments to my languages, and I'll do so group by group. And who says that your native language was the easiest one? Given the time it took to learn it and to perfect it it could turn out to be the project that took up most of your limit and attention. So, leaving out Danish, I would say that learning to read and understand Swedish and Norwegian was easy - 1 on the leosmith index. Learning to speak them will be slightly more difficult, partly because of the risk of contamination. But certainly not more than 2. And there are lots of access to good sources here in Denmark. Icelandic is also a Nordic language, but certainly more taxing -few resources and a lot of morphology/idioms - I'd say 4, maybe even 5 (because of the lack of resources) I simply don't remember whether English gave me any particular problems, except the ortography. The amount of resources is simply overwhelming, and I learned it at a young age. Without the ortography it would be 2, but the orthography pushes it up to 3 (and without all the exposure to written English the ortography alone would have pushed it to 5). The same things to some extent apply to German, at least here in Denmark. However here the ortography isn't a problem, but the morphology is (and the noun gender problem certainly is). So even though I didn't have much problems with it, it must have taken up so much time and effort that it qualifies as a 4 as a language to learn - though keeping it in shape doesn't cost me much time (from that angle it would at least one step lower). Paradoxically I haven't spent nearly as much time on Dutch and I have settled for a lower level, so Dutch is 3. And Given that I could build on Dutch (and have an even lower level expectations I would put Afrikaans at the same level, and if the resources were more plentiful it would end at just 2 due to the very simple grammar. Learning some Low German was possible because of NDR's "Talk of Platt", but since this program died the resource situation is precarious - I don't spend much time on it, but I would put it at 3. I learned some Latin, Italian and Spanish from books at home, whereas French was taught in my school. I would say that French has cost me more trouble than Spanish and Italian because I had to deliver concrete results at school, it was not just a hobby. So let me give it 4 (the orthography is a problem, but my knowledge of the other languages more or less solves that problem). Later I had to raise the bar to get my degree, but then I also had a much better resource situation. So I keep the 4. Both Spanish and Italian get the same assessment, 4, but with another background: fewer resources, but also less expectations. In contrast both Portuguese and Catalan get 3 because I have learnt them as 'offspring' of Spanish. In contrast Romanian gets 5: it is isolated within the Romance languages, and the resource situation is fragile (although I learnt it with a native speakers as my teacher, which certainly was a help). latin ends at 6, partly because of the grammar, but also because I learned it entirely through the grammar-translation method (with contains some sound elements, but didn't make the language 'live'). Besides the thinking of the Romans as well as Medieval monks was quite different from my own mind set. Modern Greek? Well definitely easier than Old greek or Koiné (which I haven't tried to learn), and the alphabet has not been much of a hindrance to me. The biggest problem is acquiring enough vocabulary. And that means that I have to put it at 5. Russian. Ouch! The language which along with Latin has given me most problems, given that I have had to learn it from almost scratch without a teacher at a time where I didn't have much time to spare AND that I to this date have heard very little spoken Russian... well, if I had learned it alongside Latin I would have put them at the same level, but given the curcumstances it ends up at 7. The good thing is that I already now have experienced how my investment in Russian has made it fairly easy to deal with other Slavic languages, so when I get to study them I expect them to end up as low as maybe 4 - time will tell whether this is realistic. Anything worse than Russian? Yes, Irish. The grammar is worse, and the resource situation is desperate - apart from the internet, where a devouted cercle of devotees have supplied us with some excellent tools. Still Irish ends at 8. In comparison Bahasa Indonesian has been a walk in the park. Of course nearly all vocabulary is new to me (even European loanwords are behasafied), but the derivation system connects much of it. There is no morphology to speak of (derivations and syntax fill the gap), and the orthograhy is a true gift to humanity in all its simplicity. On the other hand the resource situation isn't good, especially not when you want to read about science, and South East Asia is far away. So even though everybody tells me that Bahasa is a breeze I'll but it at 4. Esperanto? Very regular, though not as logical and well thought out as its speakers tend to say. Written resources so-so, but a good selection on the internet. And I know almost all the words from other languages. I'll give it 3 - but with more books and magazines it would max. be at 2. I have not assigned the degrees 9 and 10. I reserve 9 for exotic languages like Chinese and Japanese where there are serious problems in the writing systems, in the way of thinking and in getting enough vocabulary, but where the resources are relatively plentiful. The final and terrifying leosmith index 10 is reserved for languages that present the same or worse linguistical problems, combined with almost absent resources. American Indian languages like Navaho would definitely belong here - and I'm definitely not going to waste my time at anything at that level. Life is too short for that. Edited by Iversen on 01 January 2011 at 5:43pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| mirab3lla Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom lang-8.com/220477Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5448 days ago 161 posts - 229 votes Speaks: Romanian*, EnglishC2, German Studies: Spanish, FrenchB1, Mandarin | Message 11 of 29 01 January 2011 at 4:46pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Romanian - 1
English - 2 German - 3 Spanish - 4 And although I am not quite sure if I reached the 100 hour limit... Aromanian - 2 (this is actually a dialect of Romanian, but it seems to me that i is so unique that it deserves to be called a true language - this resembles me of the relationship between German and Swiss German) French - 5 Russian - 6 Hungarian - 7 Is it just my case, or the difficulty of languages is decreasing with the number of hours of study (although Aromanian is again an exception here, but I won”t count it due to the similarity between it and Romanian)? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Fat-tony Nonaglot Senior Member United Kingdom jiahubooks.co.uk Joined 6145 days ago 288 posts - 441 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Russian, Esperanto, Thai, Laotian, Urdu, Swedish, French Studies: Mandarin, Indonesian, Arabic (Written), Armenian, Pali, Burmese | Message 12 of 29 01 January 2011 at 5:00pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I'm using a scale of 1-20 because I gave out too many half points. I've also relaxed
the 100 hr limit down to 50 hrs to give some less-studied languages a mention. 1 - Esperanto;Tok Pisin 2 - Spanish;Italian 2.5 - French;Portuguese 4 - Swedish 5 - German 7 - Indonesian 8 - Armenian;Czech;Slovak;BCS 9 - Hindi/Urdu;Farsi;Nepali 10 - Russian;Polish;Latin 11 - Pashto 12 - Turkish;Swahili 13 - Estonian 14 - Thai;Khmer;Lao;Vietnamese 15 - Arabic (MSA only) 16 - Burmese;Hebrew 17 - Somali;Tagalog 18 - Mandarin 19 - Japanese 20 - Korean 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7161 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 13 of 29 01 January 2011 at 6:15pm | IP Logged | |||||
Yeah, I should've spotted that. Bloody New Year's hangover... 1) English 2) French 3) German 4) Polish 5) Slovak 6) Czech 7) BCMS 8) Ukrainian 9) Slovenian 10) Hungarian 11) Latin 12) Romanian 13) Finnish 14) Lithuanian 15) Estonian For me, Polish, Slovak and Czech have virtually the same level of difficulty - however I had to rank them numerically. In this instance, even though I've often stated in other posts that I consider Slovak to be the easiest Slavonic language for foreigners to learn, I actually began learning Polish in a classroom and had an excellent teacher who eased my introduction to Slavonic languages (Polish was my first Slavonic language) and I got a lot more out of it than if I had ventured on my own. With Slovak, I had no expert who was readily available to help me (at best I'd send an email to a friend and a few days later I would get an explanation - although not always a convincing or clear one, unfortunately) Latin is indeed at no. 11. I never did get a handle on Latin declension as it's rather similar to Lithuanian's in that nouns are divided into various classes. Yet these divisions have never seemed intuitive to me. Each class has its own declensional pattern and I had a helluva time assimilating them. Certainly it's a far cry from the relatively simplified models used in modern Slavonic languages which have largely reorganized the original noun classes into broader ones that often consider the gender of the noun (which in itself has tended to become mechanicnistically determined by considering whether the final letter ends in a consonant, -a, or -e/-o). Latin conjugation was only slightly less complicated but again I got tripped up by the assignment of verbs into different conjugational classes (the "third conjugation" is especially tricky). 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6555 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 14 of 29 01 January 2011 at 6:53pm | IP Logged | |||||
nice!
Yeah, I knew that people would put their own spin on it, and that's totally cool. But I wanted to quickly mention that some of you may be missing the point of the thread. I wanted to know what your opinion was of the difficulty of the languages you have personally studied for at least 100 hours. I didn't want another thread where people rank the difficulty of all the world's major languages. I didn't want people to worry about leaving the top numbers blank because they've never studied asian languages. I just wanted them to say which ones were harder/easier for them, and by how much, without having to guess about languages they haven't studied. For example, my list says that Japanese is about 5 times as hard as Spanish, or twice as hard as Russian, for me. That's my experience, and I was curious what other peoples' is. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Segata Triglot Groupie Germany Joined 5176 days ago 64 posts - 125 votes Speaks: German*, Japanese, English Studies: Korean, Esperanto | Message 15 of 29 01 January 2011 at 7:25pm | IP Logged | |||||
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(1) German
(2) English (5) Japanese (13) Korean.. nah, more like 6 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6708 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 16 of 29 01 January 2011 at 7:26pm | IP Logged | |||||
I did precisely that from level 1 to level 8 ... but then I also had to tell why I didn't put any languages at the top of the scale, and that's because I haven't got time to learn the candidates. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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