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: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 04 2017, @02:44PM (16 children)
It would be interesting to have not only the difficulty for an English speaker, but also the difficulty for native speakers of other languages. In particular, it would be interesting to compare the difficulties in reverse-directions: Is it harder for an English-speaker to learn French, or for a French-speaker to learn English?
Or more generally, are there languages whose speakers are better at learning other languages (maybe because it already has more of the structures found in other languages)?
Also, is it possible to separate an inherent difficulty of a language from a difficulty from dissimilarity of native and foreign language? (The two-way comparisons mentioned above would probably be a key tool for that; however only if they provide at least a pre-order on all languages).
(Score: 3, Informative) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday December 04 2017, @04:36PM
After all the conquered Britain in 1066.
It's not true that the French refuse to speak English. There's an easy way to get Francophones to speak English:
Speak to them in French. At least that worked for me. I managed to memorize a few phrases but my pronunciation was a catastrophe.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Monday December 04 2017, @05:55PM (4 children)
And the inputs to that function can change very quickly - let's look at the hardest splat on the map - the Ugrimugris. I can assure you that if you encounter an Estonian under the age of about 35 (non-rural, and one with Estonian as their home tongue rather than Russian) you are pretty much guaranteed very good English, some of the best in Europe. Flip to the over-50s, and you'll find such skills relatively rare, proof of how well and how quickly Estonia was able to reinvent itself and educate its youth after the soviet occupation.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by Virindi on Monday December 04 2017, @06:57PM (3 children)
Actually, Arabic is the hardest language on the map. Look at the bottom :)
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Monday December 04 2017, @07:48PM
I thought Arabic was off the chart, and the dark blue is just the Arabic-laden version of French they speak in the former Colonies, which should also show up as a dot representing Marseille.
(grin, as he says)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 04 2017, @08:57PM
Arabic hard? Looks to me like Germany is Orange.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by FatPhil on Monday December 04 2017, @09:41PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Lester on Monday December 04 2017, @06:42PM (1 child)
Once I read that English is not as easy as Spanish (I'm Spaniard). Starting to speak English is easier than Spanish, (simple flexion verbs, no grammatical gender...).
But after going through the first difficulties, Spanish is much easier to master than English.
English has a very difficult pronunciation, Spanish has 5 vowels, English 12. Orthography is easy in Spanish (when you see a new written word, you know how to read it). Phrasal verbs is something you never master. Vocabulary is duplicated, Germanic roots vs Latin roots (i.e. get out vs exit). Verbs have no flexion, so there are many nuances that are expressed with phrasal constructions. The meaning of a lot of words depend on the context, much more than in Spanish (probably because English has much more monosyllabic words than Spanish).
So, learning a language to check in a hotel is easier in English than Spanish, but to have an interesting conversation or reading a book, it's easier in Spanish than English.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 04 2017, @09:43PM
The FSI focuses less on how easy it is than how long it takes to learn because that's the relevant piece of information. Since these are diplomats and staffers there's a ton of motivation to do the work necessary as failing can lead to losing not just a job, but an awesome opportunity.
But, languages in general are hard to rank by difficulty because they have different forms and structures. Mandarin Chinese is in some ways an incredibly easy language at first, but it becomes more and more difficult as you get into it. The written form requires an incredible amount of work to get much out of it.
As you, correctly, point out, what you're intending to do with the language is also a significant factor. Sometimes, like with Spanish, the reading is easier, and sometimes, like with Mandarin, the speaking and basic communication is easier.
In most cases though the degree to which you can start using the language productively is the biggest difference between an easy and hard language. If you can quickly learn a few phrases and just keep adding to that, it's going to be easier than if you're having to do a ton of study in order to make any use of the language.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 04 2017, @07:13PM (5 children)
People in East Asia tend to have DNA that helps with distinguishing pitch. Observe that most of East Asia speaks tonal languages.
There is an interesting feedback loop here. If people have that DNA, then a tonal language is more likely to be created. If people speak a tonal language, then those with that DNA have an advantage. Culture and DNA influence each other, making it really difficult to distinguish them in research.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday December 04 2017, @08:07PM (1 child)
How do you figure on it being genetic? Sure, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese have tonal / pitch accents, but so do lots of languages from other continents. It's extremely common in African languages, for instance, to have tonal aspects. Some dialects of English, particularly those that are spoken in areas once dominated by areas that have a tonal accent, has tonal elements added to it.
And I for one wouldn't be upset if pitch was used to distinguish between "through" and "threw" and other homophone pairs, rather than relying as heavily on context as English does.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Monday December 04 2017, @08:41PM
English has tones, too, but most people don't realize it. Unlike Chinese, where tone carries the primary meaning, in English tone conveys connotation and context.
Try it:
Flat tone:
A: "I can't make up my mind where we should eat dinner. Mexican is cheap, but can be too spicy. Japanese is good, but expensive. Indian tastes good, but gives me indigestion."
B: "So...?"
Rising tone:
A: "You're a mean person."
B: "So?"
Falling, Rising tone:
A: "Why are you dancing from one foot to the other?"
B: "I have to pee so badly."
Falling tone:
A: "It's not true that you finished your essay."
B: "Is so!"
Washington DC delenda est.
(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.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Monday December 04 2017, @11:45PM
Um, NO.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by NewNic on Monday December 04 2017, @10:34PM (1 child)
The US Defence Language Institute in Monterey regards English as one of the hardest languages to learn.
Grammar is simple, but there are lots of irregular verbs and other features of the language that make it difficult to become a fluent speaker.
lib·er·tar·i·an·ism ˌlibərˈterēənizəm/ noun: Magical thinking that useful idiots mistake for serious political theory
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 05 2017, @09:13AM
Being from Denmark, right between Britain and Germany, I found English very easy to learn, with the irregularities being something I only notice when pointed out.
German, however... I learned German for six years in School, and usually explain that in those six years, I learned six German words: Der, die, das, den, dem, des.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 04 2017, @02:51PM (3 children)
Individuals have unique affinities and abilities, so this study is at best a very generalized indicator.
As an American, I picked up reasonable fluency in German much more quickly than Spanish. I didn't see much reference to shared roots of one's parent language being much difference.
Russian remains on ongoing struggle after more than two years because the subtleties of pronunciation and the variations of gender usage are quite difficult. My last visit to Volgograd hilariously highlighted my challenges. Luckily my hosts were very gracious and found much to laugh with me about my Russian tongue.
Выпьем за то, чтобы у нас всегда был повод для праздника!
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 04 2017, @02:56PM
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday December 04 2017, @04:34PM (1 child)
"Marina."
"Govayrisch te po-Russkiy yazik?"
"Da!" then... "How did you know?"
"You said your name was Marina."
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 4, Funny) by RamiK on Monday December 04 2017, @06:48PM
This is what Russians keep asking me: ты говоришь по-русски [wiktionary.org]
And this is my answer: я не говорю по-русски [wiktionary.org]
Sometimes I also mix it up with я не знаю [wiktionary.org] and я не понимаю [wiktionary.org] to get the message across if they keep yelling Russian at me as if increasing the volume will make it better. When all else fails I find imitating the neighbor's kids when they get yelled at and saying Я хочу кушать get results. Well, mostly borscht... But at least they stop yelling.
compiling...
(Score: 2) by looorg on Monday December 04 2017, @02:56PM (16 children)
That is not how I interpret "unclassified", I see it more as they are so insignificant we don't teach it at all so we have no data.
That said I would think Finnish would be a lot harder. More super deep dark blue. It's like a completely alien language, I think I would pick up Martian faster then the I would learn Finnish. Thank God we forced them to speak Swedish in all the important parts of the country.
Also what exactly do they mean with learning here? Is it that you can sound like a, stupid, tourist or child or that you can pass as a native? I have still to meet a foreigner that passes for a native or that can even hold up a normal conversation for any length of time without being able to spot them as the outsiders they are even after them having spent years here.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday December 04 2017, @03:08PM (1 child)
It means they'll not make any mistakes when using "My hovercraft is full of eels" (for your pleasure [youtu.be])
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by esperto123 on Monday December 04 2017, @05:38PM
If I said you have a beautiful body, would you hold it against me? I'm no longer infected!
(Score: 2) by Kromagv0 on Monday December 04 2017, @03:30PM (1 child)
Make Estonian and Hungarian dark blue as well and it would seem reasonable. As they are all considered the most difficult European languages for an English speaker to learn. My understandign is that they are easier than Chinese but are difficult.
T-Shirts and bumper stickers [zazzle.com] to offend someone
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Monday December 04 2017, @06:51PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by t-3 on Monday December 04 2017, @03:55PM
From what I've heard, Finnish is hard, but it's not that hard if you use a modern natural language approach. Try to memorize cases and grammar, you're never gonna make it. There are some good books a relative recommended me that they used to study when they went over there, don't ask me for the names - even if I could remember I'd probably spell them wrong. I still have to look in the family cookbook half the time when I try to remember which are the double letters in piirakka. All that being said, I've tried and failed a couple of times to learn, mostly due to lack of real interest in Finnish stuff outside of food. I'd like to go visit at some point, but I really don't want to hang around any Laestadians, even if we are related.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Justin Case on Monday December 04 2017, @03:56PM
Isn't that the point? If they learn it that well, they blend in.
From my very brief attempts at learning languages, I noticed:
1. It isn't enough to learn the words, pronunciation, stress, tone etc. You have to learn the culture. And that could take, well, a lifetime.
2. There are a lot of native English speakers who screw it up frequently. But they still get their point across. And isn't that, after all, the goal of communication?
I'd like to go back to grade school and tell all my prescriptive grammar teachers where to shove it.
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Monday December 04 2017, @04:20PM (3 children)
They break learning down into five levels.
Level 1: You can say hello, goodbye, and one beer please
Level 2: You can sound like a stupid tourist or child
Level 3: Foreign accent, but reasonable conversational vocabulary on a variety of subjects
Level 4: Really, really proficient
Level 5: Native speaker (or can't tell the difference)
These hours are typically to get someone to level 3.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 04 2017, @04:32PM (2 children)
One year of High School German is equivalent to how a 5 year old native German would speak.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday December 04 2017, @06:43PM
That must depend a lot on your high school. After a year of German I could say things from the lessons, but I was hardly as fluent as a 5-year old. Closer to 3, but with a very different vocabulary. (I know of very few 3 year olds who would say the equivalent of "Gee, that's probably the oldest car around here." Or "Tell me, Mr. policeman, which way is it to the railroad station.".)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 05 2017, @09:03AM
After six years of German, I know six words: Der, die, das, den, dem, des.
I believe it depends a lot on the school and teacher, my luck was just so bad that I had four teachers that all had the idea that grammar is the most important thing in German.
Oh, I also learned a couple of German words in history lessons, but they are only useful when really p*ssed off at a German person, one of them being "sieg".
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Monday December 04 2017, @06:20PM (5 children)
However, I knew I was going to find it hard to learn when the teacher got a response "bussissä" rather than "bussissa" from one of the students, choked, attempted to repeat the error, and then said "It can't be bussissä - you *can't even say it*" (as it violates vowel harmony). The view that something that was actually said (out of sloppiness and ignorance, but fuck it, it was something like our third lesson) is impossible to say made us all feel that none of us would come out of the class with a great grasp of the language. To this day (that was 15 years ago), my g/f and I still use "you can't even say it" as an in joke in various circumstances, as it stuck out so much.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday December 04 2017, @06:53PM (1 child)
So she should have said "One can't even say...". Lots of languages (all languages?) have rules about what sounds are included, and which are slopped together into one sound. And native speakers of those languages literally *can't* either say or hear the excluded sounds. The traditional example is the way Japanese (and Chinese?) blend the sounds of "l" and "r" so that sounds which are quite distinct to the English ear are essentially identical to their ear.
A slightly more accessible example that can easily be brought into conscious awareness is the different sounds that "th" makes. It's not quite a minimal pair, so you actually can hear the difference..but you've got to attend carefully. Try saying:
"Thy thigh"
One of those "th" sounds is voiced, as you can tell if you place a finger on your neck over the vocal cords. The voiced one vibrates the cords.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 3, Informative) by FatPhil on Monday December 04 2017, @09:16PM
Finns, not having a native voiced "b", but being positively peppered with unvoiced "p"s, sometimes confuse the two in foreign imports. Almost at random, both directions are possible. I have a friend who often visits a "bup" in the evening (for a "bear" (or is it a "bare"?) to boot).
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Monday December 04 2017, @08:31PM (2 children)
It's impressive you learned it. As a bonus you should have a leg up learning Hungarian now.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Monday December 04 2017, @08:32PM (1 child)
...Also, (hit 'Submit' too quickly) it would give you a leg up learning Tolkien's Elvish, since he based those on old Finnish.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Monday December 04 2017, @09:27PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 04 2017, @03:34PM (2 children)
I'd be interested to see how Esperanto compares to these. Even though I suck at learning languages, it seemed much easier than French/German/Spanish/etc.
(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.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday December 04 2017, @04:30PM (4 children)
"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.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by isostatic on Monday December 04 2017, @05:04PM (2 children)
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)
-e.
I know this because a friend operates a Filipino grocery store in Alameda, California. He sells the newspaper with those appalling ads.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by inertnet on Monday December 04 2017, @10:34PM
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
Since you sad tomcat I believe the proper German would be der Kater.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday December 04 2017, @04:32PM (2 children)
"What class did you do the worst in?"
"German. I never had a clue!"
(Uh Oh I forgot this guy is a German immigrant!)
He proceeded to speak to me in German. To my great surprise I understood him and was able to respond well enough that he understood me - quite likely I was getting a lot of it wrong, but that didn't matter to him.
We converse in German for ten solid minutes. That's the only real German conversation I ever had.
At CERN, everybody switches to English when Americans are around. I didn't learn anything of any foreign language there.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 04 2017, @05:42PM (1 child)
Tell us of your travels, MDC. In which country have you tasted the best cock?
(Score: 3, Funny) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday December 04 2017, @09:25PM
In the gay part of Portland's Paris Adult Theater.
I celebrated my paycheck by signing up for a six-month membership and a locker at Hawk's PDX.
But Welbutrin sometimes makes it impossible to get my cookies. A really nice man worked very very hard for almost an hour, but eventually I gave him a hug and said "It's just not going to happen."
I cut my dose in half starting that evening - I didn't take my evening dose.
This morning before work I had to work really hard too but I spooged all over the place.
Next Question?
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Monday December 04 2017, @04:33PM (8 children)
I spent 5 years at school 'learning' French, massive waste of time. I rarely go to a French speaking country (just looking down the most recent countries I've been to - they spoke Hausa, Hindi, Hebrew, German, Dutch, Russian, Arabic, Portugese. I haven't been to a French speaking country since November 2014)
Even when I do end up, the stuff I was taught is pretty useless. I can ask for a coffee in French, decipher a few items on the menu, but what possible reason would there be to be able to describe the house I live in or being able to describe the advantages and disadvantages of living in a seaside town?
Rather than picking a language which most people won't need at age 11, I'd far rather see our schools teach a smorgasbord of them. Rather than spending 500 hours learning a language that is likely unimportant, instead learn the basics in a whole range - say French or German, Spanish or Portugese, Arabic, Russian, Mandarin and maybe Japanese.
Just the basics that would help in day-to-day life if you were to visit those countries (not live there - in that case you'd do a more intensive course that would be relevant) - a bit of flattery "Hello, how are you, good to meet you, etc", and a few useful things like "Take me to this hotel/airport/station please", "please don't shoot me I have a family", "2 more beers please", be able to read a few things on a menu, a touch on the some customs of various countries (drinking and eat), that type of stuff.
Learning something like "Je trouve que les profs nous donnent trop de devoirs à faire le soir" or "Pour moi, trouver un emploi que j’aime est plus important que de gagner beaucoup d’argent" (both phrases cribbed from Bitezie) is completely pointless.
(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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 04 2017, @08:03PM
I think it would be best to teach something like interlingua, which will allow one to read most Romance languages, and maybe speak or understand them, the similar slavic artficial language which I can't recall the name of, and maybe Chinese characters or aramaic or arabic script. When most people can speak english, and most foreigners can't speak their language or understand it when spoken even after years of study, it's much better to teach people to read. For one thing, it's much more useful for the majority of people, who never leave the area they're born in or have any interaction with foreigners. They can still use their skills on the internet.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 04 2017, @09:59PM
That's usually because the quality of instruction isn't there combined with the fact that there's a limited number of languages available. Having both poor teaching and a language that isn't necessarily of interest to the student causes tons of problems.
The main thing holding students back is that they don't really want to learn the language they're studying in high school. They don't get to use it for anything useful and the methods of teaching are frequently decades out of date.
(Score: 2) by inertnet on Monday December 04 2017, @10:47PM
I wonder how future generations will learn languages, if at all. AI translators are getting better all the time and who knows what percentage of the next generation will bother learning another language at all.
(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.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by mendax on Tuesday December 05 2017, @12:02AM
I was surprised to see Greek as being considered as difficult as Russian and other Slavic languages. Despite the different alphabet, modern Greek is not particularly difficult to learn, although not as easy as German. Now ancient Greek, that's a different animal. Anyone who has said that he's mastered ancient Greek verbs is lying. I once counted 44 separate verb tenses in my Homeric Greek textbook, each of which with 6 declensions. Then there are the three noun declensions with 6 cases (as I remember). And ancient Greek is just chock full of irregularities.
It makes English look pretty tame by comparison. Yowza, what a language!
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
(Score: 2) by KritonK on Wednesday December 06 2017, @11:13AM
It is interesting that the map has Categories IV and IV*, while at the same time it has a Category III without any languages in it. Couldn't they have used III and IV instead of IV and IV*? And what to they mean that IV* is "more difficult", when the metric is the time required to learn the language?