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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, @08:33PM (1 child)
The first thing bables learn is pitch, they imitate very well the pitch and tone in their gibberish, no matter the language
Simply pitch doesn't carry semantic information in most languages, so children don't practice and such skill becomes atrophied.
Nevertheless we use pitch in question and stress certain syllabes in words
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 04 2017, @09:49PM
This is completely correct. By about age 6 months a baby already has the basis of an accent. You can literally tell what the language family the baby has been listening to based on the accent of the crying. In general, it's whatever sound the people of that language find to be the most annoying so you go over and figure out why the baby is crying. Without it, babies would likely starve.
The reason that adults have so much difficulty with this is primarily that we tend to filter out sounds that we don't associate with communication as being gibberish. But, if you stop listening for words and start listening for sounds the sounds are usually still there.