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posted by mrpg on Monday December 04 2017, @02:15PM   Printer-friendly
from the ¡que-bien! dept.

For English speakers:

Do you want to speak more languages? Sure, as Sally Struthers used to say so often, we all do. But the requirements of attaining proficiency in any foreign tongue, no doubt unlike those correspondence courses pitched by that All in the Family star turned daytime TV icon, can seem frustratingly demanding and unclear. But thanks to the research efforts of the Foreign Service Institute, the center of foreign-language training for the United States government for the past 70 years, you can get a sense of how much time it takes, as a native or native-level English speaker, to master any of a host of languages spoken all across the world.

The map above visualizes the languages of Europe (at least those deemed diplomatically important enough to be taught at the FSI), coloring them according the average time commitment they require of an English speaker. In pink, we have the English-speaking countries. The red countries speak Category I languages, those most closely related to English and thus learnable in 575 to 600 hours of study: the traditional high-school foreign languages of Spanish and French, for instance, or the less commonly taught but just about as easily learnable Portuguese and Italian. If you'd like a little more challenge, why not try your hand at German, whose 750 hours of study puts it in Category II — quite literally, a category of its own?

The map reckons Gaelic, Welsh, Breton, and Basque are off the charts.


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  • (Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday December 04 2017, @04:30PM (4 children)

    by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Monday December 04 2017, @04:30PM (#605109) Homepage Journal

    "How could it be that a table is a strong proud man," Der Tisch, "while a mangy feral tomcat is a proper lady?" Die Kätze.

    "I don't know. It makes sense to Germans."

    I didn't do well in my Deutsch studies because I never could remember the genders.

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by isostatic on Monday December 04 2017, @05:04PM (2 children)

    by isostatic (365) on Monday December 04 2017, @05:04PM (#605134) Journal

    Amazon in the UK advertise all their jobs with (m/f) at the end. This at first glance appears very odd - specifying that it's a monday-to-friday job? Surely they aren't advertising the fact it's open to men and women.

    However, Amazon's HR seems to come from Germany, and because of genders in languages - where the word for 'Cook' is 'Koch' or 'Köchin', they smiply add (m/f) or (m/w) to the end to make it clear that they aren't being sexist.

    In English we have tended to phase out gender-loaded jobs, "Firefighter" rather than "Fireman" or "Chair" rather than "Chairman" for example.

    It seems nowadays when there are 7 billion genders at any given time, and these often change from one minute to the next, the concept of a genderised language is one for the history books.

    • (Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday December 04 2017, @09:27PM (1 child)

      by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Monday December 04 2017, @09:27PM (#605310) Homepage Journal

      -e.

      I know this because a friend operates a Filipino grocery store in Alameda, California. He sells the newspaper with those appalling ads.

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      • (Score: 3, Informative) by inertnet on Monday December 04 2017, @10:34PM

        by inertnet (4071) on Monday December 04 2017, @10:34PM (#605359) Journal

        Filipino languages don't have a lot of gendered words. For instance no words for brother or sister, just sibling. None for daughter or son but just child (although different words for your own or other people's children). You have to specify male or female with the words for man or woman, so you say "sibling man" for brother or "sibling woman" for sister.

  • (Score: 3, Informative) by HiThere on Monday December 04 2017, @06:56PM

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Monday December 04 2017, @06:56PM (#605202) Journal

    Since you sad tomcat I believe the proper German would be der Kater.

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