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 inertnet on Monday December 04 2017, @10:41PM (1 child)
Romania is listed as one of the easier languages to learn. When I was there for a couple of days, I was surprised to find out that the language has a lot of words similar to Romance languages. I could recognize a lot of ordinary words but it also has a lot of Slavic words that I don't know whatsoever. I bet it would be easy to learn for French, Spanish and Italian speakers.
(Score: 2) by mendax on Monday December 04 2017, @11:50PM
That's because Romanian is a Romance language, derived from Vulgar Latin, just as Spanish, Italian, French, and Portuguese were. I'm told, however, of the Romance languages it is the most difficult to learn.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.