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Reversing the FSI difficulty ranking | ||
Tags: Difficulty | FSI | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| tristano Tetraglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 3861 days ago 905 posts - 1262 votes  Speaks: Italian*, Spanish, French, English Studies: Dutch | Message 1 of 6 01 January 2015 at 1:28pm | IP Logged | ||
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We can consider this thread as a spin-off of the one talking about language difficulty for speakers of slavic
languages. The FSI difficulty ranking puts for the category V (the most difficult for native English speakers): - Arabic - Cantonese (Chinese) - Mandarin (Chinese) - Japanese - Korean How difficult are the other languages for the speakers of these ones? Somewhere I read that for speakers of Mandarin Spanish is considered to be overwhelmingly difficult. But then what about slavic and Germanic languages, or others like Turkish, Hungarian, Finnish, Georgian...? And what is the most difficult asian major language for the native speakers of other asian languages? Mandarin, for example, according to many, is considered to be one of the easiest for them. What else... I read somewhere about a myth that says that speakers of Malayalam can learn every languages to fluency outstandingly fast (like 6 months). Of course, language difficulty is not an exact science, and Chinese people definitely learn to speak totally alien languages like Italian and Dutch. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| day1 Groupie Latvia Joined 3706 days ago 93 posts - 158 votes Speaks: English | Message 2 of 6 01 January 2015 at 3:02pm | IP Logged | ||
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Well, Chinese speakers would have problems with languages such as Russian or Finnish, mainly because of all the Grammatical cases (which is quite an alien concept for Chinese) and declensions of verbs and stuff. Spanish would be a bit easier for them, I'd say.
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| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 6970 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 3 of 6 01 January 2015 at 9:30pm | IP Logged | ||
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See Cacti from non-native speakers of English for related discussion.
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| kanewai Triglot Senior Member United States justpaste.it/kanewai Joined 4703 days ago 1386 posts - 3054 votes Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese Studies: Italian, Spanish | Message 4 of 6 01 January 2015 at 11:55pm | IP Logged | ||
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This is all anecdotal, but I've had a couple Japanese native speakers tell me that Turkish is
easier for them than English. They find the rhythm and cadence of the languages familiar, even if they're not related (though there is a controversial theory that they are both "Altaic.") 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| IBEP Bilingual Triglot Newbie United States Joined 3445 days ago 19 posts - 31 votes Speaks: English*, Kannada*, Spanish Studies: Mandarin, French | Message 5 of 6 02 January 2015 at 5:22am | IP Logged | ||
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I'm not so sure about that, but I do know that both
Turkish and Japanese are agglutinative languages. Speaking an agglutinative language as your mother tongue makes it much less time consuming to learn others as they require similar paradigms of thought, something which speakers of non-agglutinative languages often require practice to get acquainted with (I've heard it described by learners as "having to think backwards" or along those lines). As for the general question, it's really quite meaningless. The word difficult isn't useful. It's not quantitative or precise in the least. One might call such challenges as diverse as learning Navajo to landing on the moon to winning an Olympic gold medal "difficult," despite the fact that all of these are vastly distinct experiences. For example, luck might be a strong factor in a lunar landing, but really isn't when it comes to language learning. So when you tell some poor schmuck who wants to learn Georgian to impress his in-laws that "Georgian is difficult" what does he take from that? It seems highly improbable that he will conclude that Georgian simply requires a certain time investiture of n+1 level work, after which he will surely achieve a commensurate amount of proficiency, unless he is some sort of psychic in which case why does he need to learn a language to impress his in laws? No, much more likely he will conclude that Georgian is some indecipherable puzzle and that there is no way he could ever have the luck and/or skill to achieve such a task. That's why it makes more sense to talk about hours required. FSI gets that right, at least, despite each category being labeled in order of increasing "difficulty." 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| robarb Nonaglot Senior Member United States languagenpluson Joined 4873 days ago 361 posts - 921 votes Speaks: Portuguese, English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, French Studies: Mandarin, Danish, Russian, Norwegian, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Greek, Latin, Nepali, Modern Hebrew | Message 6 of 6 05 January 2015 at 9:00pm | IP Logged | ||
For Arabic, the other four should all be extremely hard. Arabic shares few cognates and little typology with any of those languages, and the writing system is strongly different from all of them. For Cantonese, Mandarin moves all the way to the 'Easiest' category, as they're closely related, to the point of running together in formal writing. Japanese and Korean go somewhere in the middle, with lots of cognates but an alien structure. Japanese is easier than Korean because the phonology is simpler and the kanji are familiar. For Mandarin, it is the same as with Cantonese. For Japanese, Korean should be in the 'Easy' category. Despite not sharing a common origin, those two languages have converged in typology to the point where they can almost translate word-for-word, and they share a lot of Chinese loanwords. Mandarin and Cantonese are in some intermediate category; the idea of Chinese characters is familiar and there are many cognates and cultural affinities, but the structures and pronunciation are hard. Arabic will be extremely hard. For Korean, it would be similar to Japanese, but the writing systems of Japanese, Mandarin and Cantonese would pose a bit more of a problem. That all makes Arabic sound objectively impossible, but of course it (all varieties of it) are way easier for speakers of other Semitic languages like Hebrew and Amharic, and there would be some discount coming from something like Farsi which has cultural similarities, loanwords, and the writing system. The real interesting ones are when a language becomes easier not because of being related by descent or contact, but through some abstract similarity like Japanese-Turkish. I wonder if Arabic and Chinese have any of those. 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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