As a native English speaker, I hear things like “this” language is hard/easy to learn. Does this mean it is only hard/easy to learn coming from an English background, or would someone who speaks Spanish also find it similarly harder/easier to learn as well?
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The three things that will determine your likelihood of success as a language learner are:
1. Access to the language
2. Confidence
3. Motivation
I guess if you don’t have access to a language or resources then it would be objectively difficult to learn regardless of how confident or motivated you are.
Any language where every noun has a gender (male, female, neuter, etc) and you have to have those memorized so you can use the matching article next to it. Those are tough. German is a good example.
Romance languages are a bit easier because the gender is built into the word (-o and -a in Spanish for example)
Different languages have grades to show how difficult they are to learn for a native English speaker. For example most [west] European languages are grade 1 as these share the most similarities with English. These two links will hopefully be helpful:
https://www.fsi-language-courses.org/blog/fsi-language-difficulty/
https://2009-2017.state.gov/m/fsi/sls/orgoverview/languages#:~:text=Category%20I%3A%20Languages%20closely%20related%20to%20English.&text=Category%20II%3A%20Languages%20that%20take,master%20than%20Category%20I%20languages.&text=Category%20III%3A%20Languages%20with%20significant,or%20cultural%20differences%20from%20English.&text=Category%20IV%3A%20Languages%20which%20are%20exceptionally%20difficult%20for%20native%20English%20speakers.
In my personal opinion, the languages get harder, the more beside vocabulary you need to remember.
including grammar system.
– the more conjugations (past perfect continuous)
– the more declensions
– systematic exceptions (if this rule does not apply, this rule applies)
– asystematic exceptions (in these cases you need to remeber the exception)
And Arbitrary things you need to remember.
– gender of a book
– i wear trousers not trouser
From a physical standpoint some languages have sounds that aren’t found elsewhere, or at least not in your native language.
We don’t have that rolling R sound in English, so speaking Spanish for me was really difficult. I just can’t recreate it consistently so I literally couldn’t say certain words. Same thing for Japanese people learning English. Or the clicking languages out of Africa. That sort of thing.
Speaking only about other languages with Latin alphabet (characters that you are already familiar with):
* Having the spelling and pronunciation far from each other. In German, Dutch, Spanish and Italian, you can spend 30 minutes learning how the written words are pronounced, and you are good to go! French and English only have exceptions.
* Having tones on some parts of the word. Frickin’ Swedish, yes I am looking at you. You can pronounce all the letters, but damn you! They won’t understand if you get the tone wrong.
* Articles. Romance languages have two, but German has three. You need to memorise the correct one for each noun.
* Conjugation. You need to memorise the categories of regular verbs and all the irregular one. Dutch, for example, has less than 100 irregular verbs. English has twice as much.
* Singular and plurals. English mostly adds an “S” at the end. In Italian and Swedish it depends on the article and the last letter of the word.
* How different are phrase structures from your native language. In some languages of the Germanic group, you put the verb at the end of a question.
* Different number system. French has its own tens. Such as the Gaul base 20 for 80 (4 x 20) and +10 (60+10, 4×20+10). Danish has like the Imperial version of some numbers.
Overall, some languages have a lot of stuff to remember when trying to build sentences. But don’t fret. Jump with both feet.
Most languages share some characteristics with each other, from the writing system, sounds, words or elements of grammar.
Some share a lot more with each other. Some share very little.
Obviously a language that shares more things with what you already know will usually be easier to learn.
History can tell us a lot about how languages have changed over time and how most modern languages have roots in multiple languages that have influenced each other and merged in some ways. For example, English took a lot of words from French after the Norman invasion (who had invaded France a bit before already) as the elites spoke Old French that with time gave a lot of words we find in English today. So if you know English, you can guess a lot of French words.
As French mostly evolved from Latin like Spanish and Italian, both languages also share a lot with English.
But a language from a country very far away like Chinese shares almost nothing with English, only some loanwords that came quite late.
I think the real measure is how fluently children at the same or similar levels of development and education can speak their respective languages. That is what we should call the “difficulty” of the language. I suspect most languages are roughly the same in this regard, with some caveats that the written language is much harder in some languages than others.
With that in mind, what is perhaps more relevant to our conversation is how *different* the languages are. It’s very hard to learn Japanese if your native language is English, but maybe less so if you start with Chinese or Korean as your primary language. Both of these languages are very different from Japanese in some ways, but certainly more similar to Japanese than English is. For the same reason, German or Dutch is comparatively easy for native English speakers, but likely more difficult for a Vietnamese or Portuguese person to learn.
Difficulty is relative. It really depends on what languages you know and what language you’re learning. So when people say “Chinese is hard” what they really mean is “Learning Chinese as an English speaker is hard”. Difficulty varies for each language combination. Learning resources are also not equally available in all languages. It’s easier to learn Japanese from English due to a wealth of available resources than it is to learn Japanese from Greek for example.
Other than that there is a host of parameters that determine how easy or difficult a language is. How many grammar rules they are and how strictly the language sticks to them or if there are many irregular verbs and forms that don’t follow these rules and you just have to memorise. How similar or foreign the sentence structure is and, again, how strictly the language sticks to this sentence structure or if you can switch it around and still be correct. How many tenses they are, how many voices, whether there are equivalents in your own language, how similar the writing system is, and so on.
The biggest mistake people make when learning a new language is assuming there is such a thing as a perfect translation, and that all languages have equivalents for everything in other languages. It’s inevitable when you start out that you have to translate in your head into your own language, but as you get better your goal should be to learn to think in the new language and use it intuitively rather than translating in your head. Too many people never get to that level even if they study for years. Some times translating gets a nearly identical meaning in structure and tone but other times it’s not possible, and you have to express yourself in a completely different way to get the same point across.
For me, and this is just my personal opinion, one of the biggest factors in how easy or hard it is to learn a language is how hard the writing system is. Most of our learning happens through reading and being able to read is crucial in being able to learn more. If you’re reading a passage in English for example you might see a word whose meaning you don’t know but you can still read it, and look it up. The same goes for most languages with alphabets, since alphabets are fairly straightforward, have around 20-40 characters, sometimes more but generally less than 100, which can be memorised and that enables you to read even if you don’t understand the meaning. But not all languages have alphabets. Some have syllabaries, logographies, or in some rare cases, ideographs. Some languages may have multiple different scripts or some may all share the same script despite being different languages. The problem with not having an alphabet is that this usually means you have to memorise a lot more characters, often most of them don’t follow concrete rules and so if you see a character you don’t know, you stop dead in your tracks. You can’t pronounce it, you don’t know how it’s read, and this makes it harder to look up as well. A classic example of this is Japanese. Some would say they have the most complicated writing system in the world. They have two syllabaries and also use Chinese characters in their writing. There are tens of thousands of characters, each with multiple different pronunciations and meanings, that you more or less have to just memorise, and that’s on top of the syllabaries which have 47 characters, which are on the higher end as far as “alphabets” go, even though they’re not alphabets but they work in a very similar way. So learning Japanese takes a lot of time because you have to memorize and learn all those characters. Chinese speakers have an advantage there because often the meanings of many characters are shared, but their pronunciation is often different.
Oh fun!
Actually, eastern languages are harder for westerners to speak.
We don’t have tone, and don’t have to learn a new alphabet.
Us westerners struggle with tone, pronunciation, grammar, etc. this language is entirely new to us. Learn, grow, it’ll be amazing
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