It was about the language aptitude test employed by the U.S Defence Language Institute. Based on the results of the test, applicants are allowed to enroll to study a language thought to be of appropriate difficulty, in regards to applicants language apptitude. Essentially then, they've listed popular languages in order of difficulty. Note that they are considered relative only to native English speakers.
From the article:
- Category I language: 95 or better
(Dutch, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish)
- Category II language: 100 or better
(German)
- Category III language: 105 or better
(Belarusian, Czech, Greek, Hebrew, Persian, Polish, Russian, Croatian, Slovak, Tagalog, Thai, Turkic, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese)
- Category IV language: 110 or better
(Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean)
Well. I would think a large factor pushing Chinese, Japanese and Korean to the top of the list is the written component of the language, but I'm not sure. On the other hand I get much better marks in Chinese than I do in Russian, so perhaps the list is rather subjective. I understand we have one or two students of linguistics who may occasionaly read this blog; I'd very much like to hear their opinion on this.
44 comments:
I always get into heated discussions about which language is 'hardest' to learn. A lot of English speakers take pride in knowing/thinking that English is the hardest language to learn, then there are those people who have tried for a few weeks to learn another language and decide that it is harder to learn (there are even people who think that every language is derived from Latin and therefore, by learning Latin you can then easily learn any language in the world - my former boss thought this).
I don't think there is a consensus, but I learn toward the view that languages, writing systems and cultures (the latter of which cannot be decontextualised, by the way) are all intrinsically equally difficult or easy to learn natively. That is, any normal child born in any culture will be equally able to learn the language of that culture than if it had been born into another culture.
That said, this article points out that this is relative to native English speakers, which changes the issue quite a bit. I think you can probably generalise like this and say that Dutch is relatively easy to learn from an English basis compared with (Mandarin?) Chinese, based on the genetic proximity and the grammatical similarities between English and Dutch. But at the same time, everyone is different and some may find it exceedingly easy to learn Mandarin (Laurie comes to mind) yet get completely stuck on, say, French verb inflections (even though Laurie could probably learn any language he tried, the polyglot).
At the end of the day I think it is subjective. As a linguist I take a different approach to viewing languages; I latch onto something that makes them 'interesting' to me; beit the dependent-marking and word order flexibility of Russian, the consonantal word-roots and vowel templates of Arabic (don't know the real terminology there) or the complex predicates of Australian languages like Wagiman.
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