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Ranking list of languages by difficulty | ||
Tags: Difficulty | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Teango Triglot Winner TAC 2010 & 2012 Senior Member United States teango.wordpress.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5556 days ago 2210 posts - 3734 votes  Speaks: English*, German, Russian Studies: Hawaiian, French, Toki Pona | Message 105 of 115 10 March 2010 at 4:54pm | IP Logged | |||||
Glad to see you eventually found that document again. I know about the FSI's (Foreign Service Institue) 3 language difficulty levels based on classroom hours, and am also aware that the US army has 4 different levels based on the DLAB (Defense Language Aptitude Battery) test. However, I've only recently heard about this FCO list. I've seen several people quoting it on various sites now, but no-one as yet has offered a link to the official source, and I couldn't find anything on the FCO website either. Maybe I missed it somewhere on the forum. I'm quite intrigued as to how many hours are designated at each level. Do you have a link? Edited by Teango on 10 March 2010 at 4:57pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| spanishlearner Groupie France Joined 5454 days ago 51 posts - 81 votes Speaks: Spanish* | Message 106 of 115 10 March 2010 at 5:06pm | IP Logged | |||||
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The FCO classification seems much more thorough and detailed (and probably more accurate too) than the FSI list. I too would like to have a look at the original document. Particularly, does it take into account reading and writing or just listening and speaking? Edited by spanishlearner on 10 March 2010 at 5:07pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| kerateo Triglot Senior Member Mexico Joined 5646 days ago 112 posts - 180 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English, French Studies: Italian | Message 107 of 115 10 March 2010 at 7:02pm | IP Logged | |||||
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The only thing I dont get from the British classification is why Romanian is in a different category than the other romance languages, I always though that french was the most difficult of the bunch.
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| spanishlearner Groupie France Joined 5454 days ago 51 posts - 81 votes Speaks: Spanish* | Message 108 of 115 10 March 2010 at 7:52pm | IP Logged | |||||
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What I wonder is where would Tamil and other Dravidian languages fall on that table. Edited by spanishlearner on 10 March 2010 at 7:52pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5430 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 109 of 115 11 March 2010 at 12:42am | IP Logged | |||||
I do believe that it is possible to be fluent in a foreign language with a few hundred words and basic sentence construction. The fundamental question of course is how one defines fluency. For me fluency refers specifically to be ability to speak in a spontaneous and appropriate fashion without exhibiting too much hesitation and with good grammar and vocabulary. Note I said good. I did not say large. A few hundred words does not mean a limited vocabulary. Quite the contrary, the most common words in a language are usually the ones with the most meanings. That fact forms the basis for any strategy for achieving rapid fluency. Learn the basics very well and expand the vocabulary as necessary. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Carisma Diglot Senior Member Argentina Joined 5622 days ago 104 posts - 161 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC1 Studies: Italian, Mandarin | Message 110 of 115 11 March 2010 at 7:35pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I'm a Spanish native speaker and this is how I would rank them. (I'm not including some of them because I have no knowledge about them).
From Hardest to Easiest. ASIAN 1) Cantonese/Arabic. 2) Mandarin. 3) Japanese. ROMANCE 1) French. 2) Spanish. 3) Latin. 4) Portuguese. 5) Italian. GERMANIC 1) German. 2) English. OTHER 1) Greek. 2) Russian. And mixing the families... I'd say the hardest are Cantonese/Arabic and the easiest is English. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| unityandoutside Diglot Groupie United States Joined 6014 days ago 94 posts - 149 votes Speaks: English*, Russian Studies: Latin, Mandarin | Message 111 of 115 12 March 2010 at 8:13am | IP Logged | |||||
I would guess that it's because Romanian still has noun declension. Also, Romanian phonology has taken a very unique twist, so while a great deal of its vocabulary is still cognate to Latin and other romance languages, the connection is a bit harder to see than in the case of Spanish or even French (French phonology is pretty twisted too, but French vocabulary has a much stronger affinity to English) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| robsolete Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5385 days ago 191 posts - 428 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French, Russian, Arabic (Written), Mandarin | Message 112 of 115 12 March 2010 at 7:06pm | IP Logged | |||||
I haphazardly attempted to learn a little Kannada when I was volunteering in rural Karnataka for five months, and while I never got deep enough to really be an authority on the matter, my guess is that it's harder than Hindi or other distant Indo-European languages, but probably easier than East Asian or Semitic languages. The Kannada and Telugu scripts are things of beauty: very phonetic and easy on the eyes. They both have around 50 characters, the morphology of which changes depending on what vowel is used with each. It's a lot to learn up front, with hundreds of different possible characters, but after a while it makes sense. I could pick a few choice words out of newspaper headlines before I left. Spoken Telugu is absolutely gorgeous, often referred to as "the Indian Italian" because of its open sounds and lilt. Kannada is similar, and for some reason struck me as oddly Spanishy. Tamil is a bit less open, but still pleasant, with a very ancient and interesting script. Malayalam is the strangest bird of them all, with a crazy rising-and-falling intonation when forming sentences that is unlike anything I've ever heard--when Malayalam speakers learn English they often take this pattern with them, which opens them up to a little bit of soft ridicule from many other Indians. The script is also very different from the others--I don't really know anything about it. For Kannada I can say this. Pronunciation can be a bit of an issue, as there are a lot of very specific aspirations that some non-native speakers might never be able to differentiate unless they live there for years (ex. the alphabet has a "dha" character and a "dHa" character which are the same sound with different breath control. I could make the different sounds, but picking them out in native speech was almost impossible, which is a problem because the word meaning can be completely changed by the aspiration). If I remember, Kannada at least has something like an agglutinated system. To say "I am going to Bangalore" you say "Nannu Bengaluru-ge" ("I Bangalore-going-to") and "I want that pen" is "Nanna-ge beku adu pennu" ("Mine-going-to is desired that pen"). So the grammar is a little wonky for English speakers, but generally very logical from what I could tell. I was told that it has a mathematical logic, as the Dravidians are reputed to be naturally gifted at math (looking at Bangalore's IT, medical research, and engineering booms, and my experiences with the kids, they may be on to something). So yeah. If you can imagine Turkishy grammar with Spanishy sounds, a really great (if complex) orthography and a super-strict pronunciation that requires a trained ear, then you have my vague and awful description of Kannada. Of the Dravidian languages in India, according to the locals I asked, the difficulty seems to be, from easiest to hardest: Telugu Kannada Tamil Malayalam But again, I never got much past "Nanna appa hesaru . . ." (My father's name is. . .) and "Nannu Amerika dinde bandedu" (I am coming from America). Basically whatever the village kids could teach me between classes, and an tattered copy of "Conversational Kannada," a book written in the 70s that's not so bad when you're surrounded by native speakers, but might be hard to study from independently. So what I say isn't worth much. Are there any Dravidian native speakers on the board to correct my ill-informed guesses? Writing all this is making me nostalgic, of course. I really did like the language, but the nature of things is that you travel 100km in any direction and the state language changes. So it's not the most practical thing ever. But definitely an under-represented, interesting, and very aesthetically pleasing family of languages for those with the inclination. Edited by robsolete on 12 March 2010 at 7:18pm 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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