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: 3, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Monday December 04 2017, @08:29PM (1 child)
Esperanto is easy to learn. It's an artificial language, so there are no exceptions to any rules, and the prefixes and suffixes are all sensible and easy. Word roots are Indo-European, and an English speaker with a passing knowledge of French, Spanish, Italian, German, or another similar European language will readily understand and remember them.
There is also a great deal of content in Esperanto, written and otherwise. Esperantists quite enthusiastically speak it with one another.
However, no country speaks Esperanto as a national language. You will never need to use it in life for anything, unless you specifically seek that out. So it's a hobby, not a practical skill.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 04 2017, @08:54PM
It's amazingly popular for something completely invented in the late 19th century.