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Ranking the "Medium Hard" Languages | ||
Tags: Difficulty | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| vonPeterhof Tetraglot Senior Member Russian FederationRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4559 days ago 715 posts - 1527 votes  Speaks: Russian*, EnglishC2, Japanese, German Studies: Kazakh, Korean, Norwegian, Turkish | Message 9 of 62 11 January 2014 at 9:33am | IP Logged | |||||
Edited by vonPeterhof on 11 January 2014 at 9:34am 10 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Марк Senior Member Russian Federation Joined 4843 days ago 2096 posts - 2972 votes Speaks: Russian* | Message 10 of 62 11 January 2014 at 10:21am | IP Logged | |||||
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All these criteria are not equal. The most important are vocabulary and writing system,
while grammar and phonology are less important. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Марк Senior Member Russian Federation Joined 4843 days ago 2096 posts - 2972 votes Speaks: Russian* | Message 11 of 62 11 January 2014 at 10:23am | IP Logged | |||||
Phonology is not grammar. Grammar is morphology, syntax and word-formation. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Hungringo Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 3775 days ago 168 posts - 329 votes Speaks: Hungarian*, English, Spanish Studies: French | Message 12 of 62 11 January 2014 at 10:30am | IP Logged | |||||
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Turkish is much easier for me than Russian, but I say this as a Hungarian speaker whose language has some common features with Turkish. Even so, I don't see why would Turkish suffixes be harder for Anglophones than Russian noun cases. Furthermore in Turkish there are virtually no grammatical exceptions, and it uses a totally phonemic Latin script. Granted, you can learn the Cyrillic alphabet in one day, but Russian still will cause you some headache with its pronunciation altering stress patterns.
3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6384 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 13 of 62 11 January 2014 at 10:58am | IP Logged | |||||
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In the real world, the Romance languages are easier to learn than the Scandinavian ones because there are great resources.
5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Improbably Diglot Newbie Norway Joined 4723 days ago 34 posts - 87 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English | Message 14 of 62 11 January 2014 at 11:06am | IP Logged | |||||
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Do those FSI "difficulty" rankings really rank difficulty, though? I thought they were just a statistic that showed how long it takes, on average, for a native (American) English speaker with limited knowledge of other languages to reach a defined proficiency level, using their methodology. There's a big difference between difficulty, and the time it takes to learn something. For example, one could say Japanese is fairly easy to learn, simple phonology, not very complex grammar. But the unfamiliar vocabulary, combined with what can only be classified as an extremely opaque and irregular writing system, greatly increases the time it takes, even if the work to be done is fairly straightforward (memorize stuff).
When people speak of difficulty, they usually talk about phonology and grammar (specifically complexity and irregularity), and rarely about vocabulary. And yet, phonology and grammar are generally the least time-consuming parts of learning any language, even if they are complex, as they are limited in scope, and can be drilled. Vocabulary and collocations are where the real work lies. Edited by Improbably on 11 January 2014 at 11:09am 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| vonPeterhof Tetraglot Senior Member Russian FederationRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4559 days ago 715 posts - 1527 votes Speaks: Russian*, EnglishC2, Japanese, German Studies: Kazakh, Korean, Norwegian, Turkish | Message 15 of 62 11 January 2014 at 11:39am | IP Logged | |||||
4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| kanewai Triglot Senior Member United States justpaste.it/kanewai Joined 4676 days ago 1386 posts - 3054 votes Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese Studies: Italian, Spanish | Message 16 of 62 11 January 2014 at 12:13pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I definitely think there is a difference between "difficult" and "time needed," even
though here I used both terms a bit loosely. Hindi and Persian were the hardest two to rank on the list, as not all of the agencies rank both of them. I have no experience in either to judge. And Turkish vs. Russian was the biggest "wtf" for me. Just based upon friends' experiences, Russian sounds far more difficult and challenging. I know a surprising number of people who have learned Turkish, and I know a lot of people who have failed to learn Russian. And yet so many sites list the Turkic family as 'harder' than the Slavic family. I'd love to hear from someone who has studied both! Personally, I also thought Indonesian was much easier than French, though FSI, FCO, and the DLI all list Indonesian and Malay as taking longer to learn. @ Serpent - I've actually had Europeans tell me that English is the easiest language to learn (!) primarily because there is such a variety of resources, and because so much popular culture is English based. Edited by kanewai on 11 January 2014 at 12:18pm 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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