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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.
(Score: 2) by Lester on Monday December 04 2017, @06:55PM (4 children)
Learning language is not easy. Period.
You must learn the rules, the vocabulary and then they must pop in your mind immediately.
To learn a language, you need thousand of hours, continuity and determination. And many hours hearing the language (from a mp3 or from native speaker) If you don't have a strong motivation you'll never learn a foreign language. I understand being a English native speaker you don't have
I started learning English when I was ten years old, I went for a month to USA alone, and I still can't understand a movie or many youtube conferences in English. I read English and write it more or less, but I really don't need to understand or speak spoken English.
You can't teach language in school with 2 hours/week. You need a lot more, unless the student has a special interest.
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Monday December 04 2017, @07:55PM (2 children)
Indeed, but you can learn a few key phrases - being able to identfy common nouns on a menu in half a dozen languages would be a very beneficial skill. Just learning how to copy the items down from the menu to pop them into your phone to auto-translate would be a massive benefit when it comes to languages like Japanese, Arabic, Hebrew, etc (I've never seen a manu that's in just Hebrew though), and that should be possible in the 2 hours a week for 5 years that you get in school.
(Score: 2) by Lester on Monday December 04 2017, @09:47PM (1 child)
Peop!e in borderline zones speak both languages because every word they learn they use it the next day, and practice again and again every day.
If you don't need it, you will forget those nouns, like dates or names you learnt in history or geography. In fact, learning a language is a waste of time if you are not going to use it, because of practical reasons or hobby.
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Monday December 04 2017, @11:53PM
I can cope better in a afrench restaurant than an Italian one, despite spending more time in Italy than France, and not having done French since 1998.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 05 2017, @09:17AM
Weird, I work as a developer, so all documentation is in English, but I've never needed to actually speak English. When I watch a movie, I need to turn subtitles off, because if I get both the English sound and Danish (my native language) subtitles at the same time, my brain gets confused.