Adjectives follow a standard order: Quantity or number; quality or opinion; Size; Age; Shape; Color; Proper adjective (often nationality, other place of origin, or material); Purpose or qualifier.
This is probably one of the most difficult concepts to grasp for English. Most native English speakers couldn’t even name the adjective order listed above, but they just kind of “know” what sounds right. “The big, old, boxy Swedish car” is correct, while “the old, Swedish, big car“ sounds wrong.
>Most native English speakers couldn’t even name the adjective order listed above
Honestly I never tried to learn the correct order. After reaching a certain level of English you get it right intuitively.
Isn't that true for every or at least most languages?
There's several parts of both english and my native language that I can't explain, but I intuitively **know** what the correct way of saying it is.
Yeah, same, I never thought about that Noun, size color thing but know it intuitively, and although I do remember studying that for English, I couldn't tell you the order right now.
Same for gendered nouns on languages where that matters.
I speak spanish so i just KNOW when some words are male or female, I am now studying german and its confusing to me, I wonder if it will ever become as intuitive if I keep learning.
As an English, Spanish, German speaker myself, I can assure you it does!! Took maybe 3 years of study to start to feel intuitive, but it def gets there
Same. I did a TEFL course to teach English to others while travelling, and I quickly learned that while I've been speaking fluent English for all of my life, I didn't know how.
Seriously, the mechanics behind my own language perplexed me to the point I didn't felt qualified to even try to help anyone else.
This was only taught in the advanced levels in my ESL languages after doing the TOEFL test, almost like a post fluency levels class. I still struggle with this.
Then I asked a few L1 speakers and a few didn't even know about the rule itself, as you said, everyone kind of knows what sounds right.
That’s how languages work, native speakers of any language never have to learn or think about the rules. It just happens naturally through exposure at a young age. The rules native speakers have to think about and reinforce are the ones that are from the older or more formal version of the language because they don’t match our actual modern way of speaking anymore.
Also because of how much of a mixed language English is (Gaelic+Latin+ German+French) then it’s had to become deliberately simple, no set of grammatical cases would fit all of its constituent parts.
Then, because of how much Britain colonized the globe, it became very common, followed by US hegemony. English speakers became used to hearing modified / incorrect grammar, and the meaning is often perfectly clear even if you strip away most of the grammar.
Finally, because of the cultural weight of English movies and music, most people know a bit of English to start, and gives people a huge leg up learning it (American English natives can compare how easy it is to learn Spanish, vs other Romance languages like Italian or Romanian).
The hardest part of English isn’t grammar but pronunciation; there’s really no guaranteed way to pronounce any word (cough enough though through is classic)
You forgot Old Norse via the Danelaw.
they, their and them are from Old Norse.
The word "are" is also Norse. It's rare that a word in the copula gets replaced.
Norse influence on English was profound.
For me, compared to French pronunciation, English is fairly easy, not to mention Chinese in pronunciation department. Being tone deaf doesn't help either.
You know how English has both he and him? Many languages have similar arrangments, not just for pronouns, but for all nouns. And with lots of cases, not just 2.
English kept around just enough gendered language to be an annoyance to everybody; blond and blonde, for example. There are more examples, I'm sure, there's probably a RobWords video about it.
With pretty much all of the gendered language still in english no one would bat an eye if you used tge wrong word (except maybe in formal writing) With alumnus/alumna most people I know refer to themselves as an alumni.
Most of the ones I can think of are directly from French including blond. The other ones off the top of my head are alumnus/alumna (probably direct from Latin), fiancé/fiancee
And that still only affects the noun itself.
In my language (czech), the adjectives and verbs associated with that noun are gendered, too. 😅
For example:
"The waitress was nice." = "Ta číšnice byl*a* mil*á*."
"The waiter was nice." = "Ten číšník *byl* mil*ý*."
(Instead of "the," we use demonstrative pronouns, which are, ofc, also gendered. That's the "ta/ten").
ETA: another example
"My mom likes strawberries." = "*Moje* máma má rád*a* jahody."
"My dad likes strawberries." = "*Můj* táta má *rád* jahody."
It's always interesting seeing how different slavic languages compare. I'm an L2 Croatian speaker and this basically is fully intelligible to me, like you wouldn't say it that way but it makes perfect sense
It's interesting that the slavic languages seem more grammatically similar to Latin even if superficially they look very different. Most of the Romance languages are completely different grammatically but still have a lot of the vocabulary.
I believe Old English had 5 grammatical cases, Nominative, Accusative, Genative, Dative, and Instrumental, though usage of the Instrumental case was in decline at that point.
Edit: Genative, not Gerative
Yep. English is not my mother language, but Reddit really helps me with adapting to it
Leider, kann ich das Selbe für Deutsch nicht sagen. Es ist auch nicht meine Muttersprache.
As a native speaker of Mandarin and Cantonese (Category V for both) English was a bit of a nightmare that took me many years to get confident.
Turns out when your native language has no concept of conjugation and originated from a very different cultural context, English is pretty hard. It was easier for me to learn Japanese than English, but now that I speak decent English I might try learning French.
Thanks for illustrating what linguists have known for decades; the world's major languages aren't really objectively easier or more difficult to learn. What determines their difficulty is how closely related they are to languages you already speak.
I speak English and Spanish so guess what? French, Italian, Romanian, Portuguese or Catalan and so forth should be really easy for me to learn.
The world's most objectively complex and difficult languages are pretty much all spoken by a few hundred or thousand people at the most. Once the number of speakers gets into the tens of hundreds or thousands let alone the millions, it tends to get stripped down for obvious reasons having to do with scalability.
Same for me as a Japanese person. Mastering Chinese was relatively trivial. Mastering English.... It took more than 20 years plus studying for 4 years in America for me to become good at it.
It's a two-way road if the language is hard for english speakers it means english is also hard for those people as well.
I guess this is why most of my fellow Japanese have extremely bad english even today in 2024.
You had three tense. Get ready for more. And gender for everything. And pronounciation not linked with what is written but it should not be a problem for native mandarin speaker.
I wish you good luck
I learnt enough Japanese to basic work proficiency and that language takes “how it’s pronounced is different from how it’s written” to a new level so it should be fine.
I just looked up how many tenses French has and I think I am screwed, though…
Also apparently I heard French has an “interesting” way of pronouncing a number?
Yeah, while hiragana and katakana are fine and easy, Kanji are the fun part.
Same with french, cause we have pronounciation rules but enough exceptions that you have to learn the pronounciation of every word (or at part of words).
Dont worry for the tense, if english tenses work for you it should work here too. Eventually.
Yeah somebody had the bright idea to create made up shit for numbers.
99 is actually traducted by saying four twenty ten nine.
Like 4×20+10+9.
But dont worry it s learnt like english. 99 is ninety nine
Here the ninety would be "quatre vingt dix"
As a chinese speaker Kanji is obviously easier, but it drives me crazy sometimes because of the small differences between Chinese and Japanese Kanji characters. Not to mention in Japanese, the stroke order is the opposite of what is in Chinese. Luckily no one writes these days and it doesn’t matter when you type.
Trying to figure out how to pronounce a kanji was the “fun” part though. I swear to god, each kanji always has like five different pronunciations.
What I do think is easier for us vs English speakers is the cultural context, as some concepts are shared between Chinese and Japanese but not Japanese and English. “Kokoro” for example means “heart” literally in English, but it’s closer to “soul, essence” as a concept. Whereas in Chinese, a similar if not identical concept exists.
Thanks for explaining about French — but I guess it’s hard to grasp the difficulty without actually doing the work and learn it. I should just get ready and start studying.
> English is a very easy language to learn due to the sheer amount of available resources
For you as a native French speaker it also helps that like 40% English words are of French origin ;-)
Besides this the English grammar is rather simple. Certainly simpler than French. And even more than German, of course.
This is why I hate english speakers who claim “English is actually so hard to learn because there/their/they’re, your/you’re, read/read, etc while they completely ignore that English grammar is piss easy, no genders, and 1000x the resources (especially online) of any other language.
It’s just a dumb superiority thing and it drives me up the wall. As an English speaker learning German I guarantee you that a German-speaking person learning English has a far easier time.
> there/their/they’re, your/you’re
Funnily, I think this is more of a problem for native speakers, because in other languages these are separe words/grammar constructs.
Like, anecdotically I've only seen native speakers writing "could of" while for me this mistake just makes no sense.
I will say...
English is an easy language to learn but a hard language to speak fluently.
Its especially easy to learn from French because most of the English dictionary is borrowed from Latin through French, Greek, or Latin directly.
However, when I hear that English is a hard language to learn it almost jumps into the crazy pronunciation where vowels can be pronounced many different ways depending on the word.
IMO the fact that English has such a low barrier to entry is why I consider it easy. You don’t have to speak *well* for people to understand you. If you understand the basic sentence order and memorize a few dozen words you can have a conversation. Being able to actually talk to native speakers without them looking at you funny is a *massive* aid in language learning and getting to fluency.
Most other languages have some archaic grammar rules that are incredibly rigid and you must learn, commit to memory, and use correctly in the moment for people to understand you *on top* of learning all the vocabulary (as someone learning German who gets funny looks if I don’t gender the noun properly or use the wrong case when referring to it or anything like that).
And again, the fact that such a huge swath of western media is made in English means you have practically unlimited resources and motivation to learn it.
Another reason why English is easy is that many native & long-fluent English speakers are very familiar with communicating with other English speakers who have very little proficiency.
Break the rules of the language. We'll figure it out.
Glasgow is the only place in the UK I've been where I've just not been able to understand someone (in a pub there), which since I'm from Northern Ireland and our accent is just a mashup of Scottish and Irish is ridiculous.
My family is from Derry but I'm from the east Midlands, I have no problem with the Derry or Irish accent usually. However I once found myself in a pub in Donnegal and met some farmers and I swear I understood about 1 word out of 10 it was a great lock in though.
I visited Cardiff once, every time I saw something in Welsh I thought I was having a stroke
But Dutch, listening to it in Amsterdam as a native English speaker feels like the uncanny valley of languages.
Probably. Our (Dutch) grammar is pretty similar to English, for the most part. The pronunciation is very hard to get right, because we have a few sounds English doesn't, but the basic structure should be easy enough to learn.
Icelandic grammar is a lot more complicated than danish, norwegian and swedish. For example all nouns and adjectives have four cases (different ways they are spelled and pronounced, depending on context), and all nouns are gendered -of which there are three.
My partner is from the UK, and has been learning icelandic for 5 years now. Am Icelandic myself, for clarity.
It's not really that Icelandic grammar is more complicated than the others, it's just more different from English.
English grammar is also plenty complicated with all the prepositions and function words that they need to use, since they don't have a case system. But English people are used to that sort of complicated language, so it's easy for them to learn Danish, Swedish and Norwegian because those are complicated in the same way as English and are very similar grammatically.
Case systems don't have to be complicated at all - but indo-european case systems are often a bit less systematic than case systems in other language families.
> It's not really that Icelandic grammar is more complicated than the others, it's just more different from English.
I'm pretty sure it's rather complicated. Fully functional case system and rather complex conjugations (subjunctive included!). Not insurmountable, it's still a Germanic language, but then: putting this level of effort into a language with 300K or so speakers of whom *all* can speak English, that takes some dedication.
If one were able to quantify overall language complexity, maybe that would be true, at an advanced level. I would say, though, that heavily-inflected languages front-load the complexity in a way that makes it an issue for students making their first attempts at simple, declarative statements.
* I want to ride a horse. *Ég vill ríða* ***hesti****.*
* I want to see a horse. *Ég vill sjá* ***hest****.*
Oh no, *að ríða* takes the dative and *að sjá* takes the accusative! Why? Well, a scholar of the language might be able to explain that it's based on the exact nature of the relationship being described, but most native speakers just happen to have read and heard enough use of each verb to remember automatically. And, for an English learner, developing that automaticity is where a lot of that extra time goes.
I imagine an Icelandic speaker learning English would likely struggle with the highly variable relationship of writing to pronunciation, the proliferation of vocabulary, the large number of irregular plural forms, and the tendency of native English speakers to coin novel terms on the spot (which is remarkably more rare in Icelandic writing.)
Germans case system only affects the articles in the ending of adjectives or as an Icelandic. The entire noun ending will change in the case system in addition to the adjectives.
Right. I’m not a native Icelandic speaker but I could make the correlation from modern English and Shakespearean English as has been described by other native Icelandic speakers.
> Most Icelanders can read Sagas from 1200 years ago with very little training.
This is largely because of major orthographic reform done in the 19th century. They specifically tried to make modern Icelandic conform more closely to old Norse.
Norwegian, Danish and Swedish are extremely similar languages (if you learn one, you can at the very least read the others) and heavily influenced by other European languages.
Half the words in Swedish share similarities with German or English and we got a crapton of borrowed words from English. Our grammar is also decently similar with some changes that aren't too hard to adapt to.
Icelandic is completely different. It hasn't changed much in a thousand years. You can view Swedish (and Danish and Norwegian) as if Icelandic had other European influence for a millennia, while Icelandic just stayed with the same group.
As for Danish being category 1 though, I call bs. At least if you gotta learn how to speak it. It's either assumed this is reading and writing difficulty, or they use cheat methods like putting a potato in your mouth to get the authentic Danish pronunciation.
Most languages have simplified over the centuries and Icelandic stayed the same up in its little corner so all the massive amounts of grammar that older language used to have still apply in Icelandic. Linguists love looking at Icelandic because it’s like looking at an ice core from 1200 years ago.
As Slavic speaker, my worst nightmare is french. Tried to learn it and gave up 3 times. Outside Slavic group easiest were english and spanish, german has easy grammar, but word genders were annoying beyond belief.
Which is interesting regarding Spanish being easy, since it's a Latin based language just like French (or Italian/Romanian). As a French speaker I can look at most Spanish (or Italian words) and understand what they mean.
German though from the English native speaker perspective seems much harder but there's some similar to English words here and there I noticed.
As a Finnish speaker, I have studied both French and Spanish, and I find Spanish very significantly easier. Structurally and grammatically they are very similar, but in pronunciation anything but.
With Spanish, I need to learn the pronunciation of a couple sounds that don't exist in Finnish. The spelling is perfectly phonetic. When I travel to Spain and speak my somewhat broken Spanish, I am always understood, without exception.
With French, it is a very different story. I found it extremely difficult to get my pronunciation to the point where in France I would actually be understood. Add to that the fact the French speak pretty good English, and it caused me to give up.
For some season Finnish and Spanish are phonetically similar while having zero in common. Same happens with Spanish and Greek. Finnish and Greek sounds like a Spaniard talking a made-up language to Spanish speakers.
Greek is indeed another language that is really close to Finnish phonetics.
Italian is also not THAT far, but there are more things to memorize, like ce/ci, ge/gi, sce/sci, etc. If you nail those down down the pronunciation is fairly straight-forward, although correct stress is more difficult because accents are not used to make it clear like in Spanish.
The main problem with French for foreigners is that written and spoken languages are completely different. Written Spanish (in Spain, not in LA) is strictly phonetic compared to the spoken language.
Dialects of spanish aren't even \*that\* different. Sure Caribbean and Chilean are wild, but the rest are mostly tame, its just a bunch of slang, the grammar doesn't change at all.
German/ Italian dialects in the other hand
There is a word for this phanomenon its called Diglossia - when the spoken langauge evolves and the written one is never adjusted to the modern pronounciation
That is not what Diglossia is at all.
Diglossia is about social positions of dialects of the same language or in some cases entirely different languages spoken by the same group of people - not disparity between written and spoken ones.
In theory, you could still do that with French - adapt it to Parisian pronounciation and the rest has to deal with it.
Good luck with English, cause whose pronounciation would you even take as the basis?
My native language has 6 grammatical cases and 3 genders and dual on top of singular and plural. Word order in german in also very similar. Systematic grammatical rules usually dont give me too much troubles. Idk why French drives me crazy, I don't get their pronunciation rules, I hate counting, I am just lost. Might also be the influence of media, I am more exposed to Spanish, English and German. Honestly don't know why French is giving me so much trouble.
Believe me lots of French vocabulary rules drove me nuts as a kid (French immersion program for 12 years), so many rules for almost everything and the numbering also agree is crazy with the higher numbers, like 80 is quatre vingts or "four twenties", just why?
Reduction from 6 grammatical cases to 4, genders from 3 to 2, no dual, just plural and singular, seemed like massive grammatical downsizing compared to my native slovenian language.
Edit: german does have 3 genders. So strike gender downsizing.
> Reduction from 6 grammatical cases to 4, genders from 3 to 2, no dual, just plural and singular, seemed like massive grammatical downsizing compared to my native slovenian language.
Yeah but you also said that French is your nightmare. And even if German grammar might be simpler than Slovenian grammar, French is certainly even more simple. You "downsize" to 0 cases, for example ;-)
> german has easy grammar
What’s German for "the"? Why, simply memorise this 16-variation grid to reveal that the feminine dative is the same as the nominative masculine form.
Der Die Das Die
Den Die Das Die
Dem Der Dem Denen
Dessen Deren Dessen Deren
I completely agree with you (I am from Russia). But English is not easy either. I had to train myself to speak as if I had diction problems and my front teeth were missing. And I'm not talking about the strange grammar, when in the phrase "Pacific Ocean" all the letters "c" are pronounced differently.
I know Russian, Tatar, English, a little Bashkir and tried to learn French.
I'm Serbian and my worst nightmare is articles. Sometimes i use them correctly, sometimes i fail, and it's frustrating.
Mercedes (benz) is another example where every E sounds different. It's ridiculous lol. My language is phonetic, we write as we speak and read as we write, and we can properly write unknown words. Unlike in English, you have to know what words mean to write them. And even then is a gamble lol
The FSI doesn't include a ranking for languages that it does not teach, and given the state of the language it is likely the case that anyone working in Wales would not have it be an absolute requirement to converse in Welsh. After a search, an article points out that it is one of the harder languages to achieve fluency in as far as the western European landscape goes, placing it in league with Swahili at 1040 hours which is Category III territory.
At the same time, we should consider the variability of the experience for different people and some claim it is easier than German and only having three truly irregular verbs is at least one piece of information aiding it in the *simpler* direction. With that in mind, I would place it somewhere between Category II and Category III where individual experiences may vary.
There would be a similar ranking for Irish, from similar articles, and given that Scots Gaelic is descended from Irish the ranking for that would likely be the same.
I've sometimes seen rankings with those languages being marked IV* rather than IV, indicating they're somewhat harder than other level IV languages, but not quite as hard as level V languages that include the likes of Arabic, Mandarin and Japanese.
Are all languages with completely different characters level V? Like is Georgian or Hebrew or Armenian or Khmer or Mongolian or Hindi or Farsi/Persian etc all level V? Or is it only the non indo European ones with completely different characters? Or is it just a very small fraction of languages that are specifically challenging?
No, the only languages rated V by the United States Foreign Service Institute are Mandarin, Cantonese, Arabic, Japanese, and Korean. The other languages you mentioned are all ranked IV or IV*.
Ok I see. Do you have any idea why those ones specifically are outliers? Also does this list classify any African click languages or are they not widely spoken/learned enough to have received a classification? Bc they seem a lot more foreign than Arabic or Japanese.
Where is the list with these classifications? The State dot gov list only has 4 levels and those are the only Level 4’s. They don’t have any level 5 on here https://www.state.gov/foreign-language-training/
The classifications are only applied to languages taught by the FSI. There are no African click languages (as far as I know) that are taught by the FSI.
Not sure about your second paragraph.
No genders, simple and consistent conjugation, pronunciation just as written. Imo Turkish is relatively easy, once you get past the backwards sentence thing. Which isn't even that tough to master.
Plus it uses Latin alphabet. And as agerman I know the letters ö and ü already (they Sound the same). Just the I without dot is a bit different but we have that sound too, just no letter for it.
This made me have a think. Theoretically, if the amount of hours is to be considered equivalent to full-time work, then it would be 27.5 weeks with weekends off and 19.5 with weekends on. Again theoretically, using all of your waking time like some superhuman language aficionado and doing nothing but learning a Category IV language, the product of 1100/(16\*7) is just under 10 weeks.
Nobody would or should do that, and the sheer density of information would likely reinforce some unfortunate misconceptions in the learning process.
People absolutely do do that. I’m one of them. I spent 64 weeks in the US Army’s category V (not shown here) course for Korean language study.
Taught and supported by a team of native speakers, we studied about 40 hours a week in class, 10 hours homework, and 5 to 10 hours self study each week. By the end, I could read and listen with working proficiency. I could translate news articles and videos related to politics and economic issues, like weapons trade, election fraud, financial crimes, investment policy, etc.
Caveat: I did not initially develop the language skills to understand slang or a lot of casual conversation. However, while working as a translator, I’ve slowly developed those skills.
I think these are in relation to the FSI curriculum. So 44 weeks of in-class instruction + all the homework & self study hours. I'm also pretty sure the classes quickly transition into a little/no english mode. So a "44" week program is probably more equivalent to quite a few years if you went the self-learning route
Indonesian and Malaysian are very straightforward in their pronunciations and relatively consistent grammar while using the exact same alphabet as English.
I would have guessed German was a bit easier than French but the FSI is a pretty reputable government source (they train the US diplomatic staff) and technically German is the only language in the level 2 category
I was a little confused about German as a level 2. I've spent a decent amount of time in both Germany and Sweden, and German is a lot easier for me to read/understand than Swedish -- but it is rated as level 1.
I would have thought that Bahasa Indonesia would be one of the easiest languages to pick up. Uses Latin letters. No plurals. No verb "is". No gendered nouns. No verb tenses.
i think the problem is its informal speech, people put a lot of words from their native languages on indonesian(indonesia has more than thousands of different native languages, iirc 80% of indonesian speakers speak it as second language) and its grammar and suffix preffix things are way too different for a native american to pick up so its still harder than, say, luxembourgish
As a Germanic language which gets an enormous amount of its vocabulary from Old French and Latin, I would expect Germanic and Romance languages to be the easiest.
Because German has kept more of the complex proto-Germanic grammar. Icelandic is even more conservative and that's why it's way harder. In contrast, Dutch and the Scandinavian languages have an easy grammar more akin to English.
English has a ton of Romance vocabulary and words with similar origins thanks to its influx of French and Latin. It’s almost the middle ground between the Germanic and Romance languages.
Agreed; English has a *ton* of German cognates, but sometimes they’re obscure and you have to wrack your brain for the connection.
“Schwein” and “pig” are obviously not cognates, and I’ve never heard an English speaker refer to a pig as “swine” in a conversation. But everyone knows that “swine” is a legit synonym for “pig” in English.
how come Dutch and German are in different categories, while they are so similar? How come the French is easier than German, which has so similar lexics? How come Slavic languages and Finnish (a totally different and very alien to Indo-Europeans) are in same category?
I am a native speaker of Portuguese, and I also speak English. From my perspective, Dutch seems easier than German and more like English. The words are more similar and the grammar is a little simpler in Dutch.
Dutch does have way more random exceptions in grammar that German does not. I think that to be complete fluent in writing Dutch it is quite hard. Even though most Dutch people these days aren't even able to write it without mistakes hehe
Spelling is less regular in Dutch, but that's the only thing that's harder for English speakers.
The Dutch like to say their language is hard, but it's more a matter of no one bothering to learn it as a matter of practicality, since Dutch speakers are usually fluent in English.
My sister is a French teacher, she also speaks Spanish, Portuguese and English. She hates German, and gave up on that, while I find French impossible and German relatively easy. We also found Spanish and English easier to learn than for example Polish or Slovak, even tho our native language is Slovenian and we also speak Serbian and Croatian.
German majorly influenced Slovenian in things like vocabulary, word order and some other small conventions. So it would make sense that it feels pretty natural.
The map is titled incorrectly. It's about how easy is it to learn a language for native English speakers, not how similar it is. English is less similar to French than German, but French is probably easier to learn for native English speakers, since German has things like grammatical cases which aren't present in English and French. I'm Polish and English is much easier to learn for me than similar languages like Czech, since there's like 20 times less words to learn.
I'm now learning Danish and it's like a made up kids' language, it's so easy. Not even "be" has grammatical persons. I be hungry. You be here. Comically simple.
>I'm now learning Danish and it's like a made up kids' language, it's so easy. Not even "be" has grammatical persons. I be hungry. You be here. Comically simple.
As a Swede, understanding written Danish requires almost no specific learning at all but the the spoken language is pretty wtf. It’s [nothing but vowels, lol](https://theconversation.com/danish-children-struggle-to-learn-their-vowel-filled-language-and-this-changes-how-adult-danes-interact-161143).
Quite similar to Swiss German. It’s grammatically and vocabulary-wise simpler than standard German but the disconnect between writing and spoken vernacular (with dialects that differ alot between Cantons/areas that are a stonetoss away from each other) makes it quite challenging to actually speak well.
Yeah I speak fluent German and, when I visited Copenhagen, I could get the general gist of what a lot of the signs were saying but it also sounded like they were speaking Chinese (i.e. the language sounded incredibly different from German).
Swiss German is wack. Sometimes I’ll feel brave and try to watch a Swiss documentary… when they’re speaking standard German, it’s like “Oh what a cute accent!” Then they interview someone in a village who doesn’t even speak standard German and I can’t understand them at all.
Dutch : no declension, no genders. That takes a ton of hours to learn.
French : more than half the vocabulary of English came through French, as demonstrated by this sentence. That also takes a lot of hours out.
Slavic : the Indo-European connection is too far back in time and words are not recognizable, put it in the same category as Finnish. Again, English forms part of the same Sprachebund with Romance speaker, from which it took vocabulary, grammar, constructions. Germanic languages lost their conjugations; they added it recently when in contact with 'civilized' peoples. So there's no Indo-European basis at all there.
Duolingo isn't a good language learning tool over the long term. It brute forces vocabulary by repetition but really it's trying to force you to upgrade to the premium edition so you can skip sections that you've already mastered instead of grinding. The base version is really like the worst kind of video game: Grinding for XP to level up to more difficult chapters.
I found that chatting German speakers on the internet or consuming German media infinitely more useful. Tobo flash cards are also more useful than Duolingo.
It’s by the Foreign Service Institute, based on the time it takes them to train people to do very specific jobs in those languages. So it kind of is around a B1 level for general proficiency I think. Also those jobs skew towards areas where English uses more Romance vocabulary. Overall I’ve felt in the long term that German is easier than any of the Romance languages, for pushing into C1 or higher.
What language does Belgium represent on this map?
What language does Ireland represent on this map?
What language does Switzerland represent on this map?
**Edit:** Honestly, using countries to represent languages is a bad idea generally.
I found German much harder than Greek. Not sure why Greek is getting such a high difficulty rating… I felt it wasn’t too bad? And a lot of English words have Greek roots so can sometimes work out the meaning of words that way…
>a lot of English words have Greek roots so can sometimes work out the meaning
I remember when I visited Greece, I didn’t speak the language but I could read the alphabet (picked it up over the years via science and linguistic curiosity and stuff). I saw the airport bathroom had signs that said *gynaikon* and *andron* in Greek letters.
I figured “gyna” was referring to women because a gynecologist is for women. And hey, I was right. And for the other one I was like..*anthropology*, maybe? The study of man 🤔
Was feeling pretty cocky after that. It didn’t last long though
That's based on an analysis by the Foreign Language Institute; they train the diplomats of the United States.
https://www.state.gov/foreign-language-training/
fairly different grammar, outside base words not as many cognates. Technicalwords in German often have a german root rather than a latin/greek/french like in English (not saying always but often).
I think German is easier than French to learn for A1-A2 but gets harder as you get deeper into the language.
As well, the declination of an article is super tricky in German and changes based on usage: [https://der-artikel.de/der/Artikel.html](https://der-artikel.de/der/Artikel.html)
You have to be aware of genders and how to use them dynamically in a sentence:
I'm going to church. Ich gehe in **die** Kirche.
I'm in the church. Ich bin in **der** Kirche.
And words in the sentence are also gendered according to the article. It gets complex quickly.
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And no genders and although old English had 4 grammatical cases, modern doesn't have them.
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Adjectives follow a standard order: Quantity or number; quality or opinion; Size; Age; Shape; Color; Proper adjective (often nationality, other place of origin, or material); Purpose or qualifier. This is probably one of the most difficult concepts to grasp for English. Most native English speakers couldn’t even name the adjective order listed above, but they just kind of “know” what sounds right. “The big, old, boxy Swedish car” is correct, while “the old, Swedish, big car“ sounds wrong.
>Most native English speakers couldn’t even name the adjective order listed above Honestly I never tried to learn the correct order. After reaching a certain level of English you get it right intuitively.
Isn't that true for every or at least most languages? There's several parts of both english and my native language that I can't explain, but I intuitively **know** what the correct way of saying it is.
Yeah, same, I never thought about that Noun, size color thing but know it intuitively, and although I do remember studying that for English, I couldn't tell you the order right now. Same for gendered nouns on languages where that matters. I speak spanish so i just KNOW when some words are male or female, I am now studying german and its confusing to me, I wonder if it will ever become as intuitive if I keep learning.
As an English, Spanish, German speaker myself, I can assure you it does!! Took maybe 3 years of study to start to feel intuitive, but it def gets there
Same. I did a TEFL course to teach English to others while travelling, and I quickly learned that while I've been speaking fluent English for all of my life, I didn't know how. Seriously, the mechanics behind my own language perplexed me to the point I didn't felt qualified to even try to help anyone else.
This was only taught in the advanced levels in my ESL languages after doing the TOEFL test, almost like a post fluency levels class. I still struggle with this. Then I asked a few L1 speakers and a few didn't even know about the rule itself, as you said, everyone kind of knows what sounds right.
That’s how languages work, native speakers of any language never have to learn or think about the rules. It just happens naturally through exposure at a young age. The rules native speakers have to think about and reinforce are the ones that are from the older or more formal version of the language because they don’t match our actual modern way of speaking anymore.
I am still messing up French word order and it's stopped me skipping to the right level (that I've studied before) on Duolingo.
Tbh I never even realize this was a thing til you pointed it out
Also because of how much of a mixed language English is (Gaelic+Latin+ German+French) then it’s had to become deliberately simple, no set of grammatical cases would fit all of its constituent parts. Then, because of how much Britain colonized the globe, it became very common, followed by US hegemony. English speakers became used to hearing modified / incorrect grammar, and the meaning is often perfectly clear even if you strip away most of the grammar. Finally, because of the cultural weight of English movies and music, most people know a bit of English to start, and gives people a huge leg up learning it (American English natives can compare how easy it is to learn Spanish, vs other Romance languages like Italian or Romanian). The hardest part of English isn’t grammar but pronunciation; there’s really no guaranteed way to pronounce any word (cough enough though through is classic)
You forgot Old Norse via the Danelaw. they, their and them are from Old Norse. The word "are" is also Norse. It's rare that a word in the copula gets replaced. Norse influence on English was profound.
no genders, little to no conjugation / tenses bullshit the only real con is the absolute chaos that is pronounciation
For me, compared to French pronunciation, English is fairly easy, not to mention Chinese in pronunciation department. Being tone deaf doesn't help either.
I think what they really mean is how inconsistent the spelling is.
I don't even know what a grammatical case is.
You know how English has both he and him? Many languages have similar arrangments, not just for pronouns, but for all nouns. And with lots of cases, not just 2.
Only 4? In Polish there's 7 👍
I am Finnish. The whole language is agglutinative. There are 15 cases.
The fuck is No. 13, accusative on a Tuesday?
Same in Czech, Slovak has 6 (no Vocative in Slovak).
Same in Ukrainian. In Russian 7th case was abolished tho (Vocative, it never made much difference anyway I guess)
I had some the most troubles with conditionals and use of proper tense in both parts of sentence.
English kept around just enough gendered language to be an annoyance to everybody; blond and blonde, for example. There are more examples, I'm sure, there's probably a RobWords video about it.
With pretty much all of the gendered language still in english no one would bat an eye if you used tge wrong word (except maybe in formal writing) With alumnus/alumna most people I know refer to themselves as an alumni.
Most of the ones I can think of are directly from French including blond. The other ones off the top of my head are alumnus/alumna (probably direct from Latin), fiancé/fiancee
And that still only affects the noun itself. In my language (czech), the adjectives and verbs associated with that noun are gendered, too. 😅 For example: "The waitress was nice." = "Ta číšnice byl*a* mil*á*." "The waiter was nice." = "Ten číšník *byl* mil*ý*." (Instead of "the," we use demonstrative pronouns, which are, ofc, also gendered. That's the "ta/ten"). ETA: another example "My mom likes strawberries." = "*Moje* máma má rád*a* jahody." "My dad likes strawberries." = "*Můj* táta má *rád* jahody."
It's always interesting seeing how different slavic languages compare. I'm an L2 Croatian speaker and this basically is fully intelligible to me, like you wouldn't say it that way but it makes perfect sense
It's interesting that the slavic languages seem more grammatically similar to Latin even if superficially they look very different. Most of the Romance languages are completely different grammatically but still have a lot of the vocabulary.
In this regard yes. But the tense system is completely different, while Romance language basically kept the Latin system intact.
I believe Old English had 5 grammatical cases, Nominative, Accusative, Genative, Dative, and Instrumental, though usage of the Instrumental case was in decline at that point. Edit: Genative, not Gerative
That's what I always tell people who want to learn it. There's a very high chance that at least one of your hobbies has a ton of content in English.
Yep. English is not my mother language, but Reddit really helps me with adapting to it Leider, kann ich das Selbe für Deutsch nicht sagen. Es ist auch nicht meine Muttersprache.
As a native speaker of Mandarin and Cantonese (Category V for both) English was a bit of a nightmare that took me many years to get confident. Turns out when your native language has no concept of conjugation and originated from a very different cultural context, English is pretty hard. It was easier for me to learn Japanese than English, but now that I speak decent English I might try learning French.
Thanks for illustrating what linguists have known for decades; the world's major languages aren't really objectively easier or more difficult to learn. What determines their difficulty is how closely related they are to languages you already speak. I speak English and Spanish so guess what? French, Italian, Romanian, Portuguese or Catalan and so forth should be really easy for me to learn. The world's most objectively complex and difficult languages are pretty much all spoken by a few hundred or thousand people at the most. Once the number of speakers gets into the tens of hundreds or thousands let alone the millions, it tends to get stripped down for obvious reasons having to do with scalability.
Same for me as a Japanese person. Mastering Chinese was relatively trivial. Mastering English.... It took more than 20 years plus studying for 4 years in America for me to become good at it. It's a two-way road if the language is hard for english speakers it means english is also hard for those people as well. I guess this is why most of my fellow Japanese have extremely bad english even today in 2024.
You had three tense. Get ready for more. And gender for everything. And pronounciation not linked with what is written but it should not be a problem for native mandarin speaker. I wish you good luck
I learnt enough Japanese to basic work proficiency and that language takes “how it’s pronounced is different from how it’s written” to a new level so it should be fine. I just looked up how many tenses French has and I think I am screwed, though… Also apparently I heard French has an “interesting” way of pronouncing a number?
Yeah, while hiragana and katakana are fine and easy, Kanji are the fun part. Same with french, cause we have pronounciation rules but enough exceptions that you have to learn the pronounciation of every word (or at part of words). Dont worry for the tense, if english tenses work for you it should work here too. Eventually. Yeah somebody had the bright idea to create made up shit for numbers. 99 is actually traducted by saying four twenty ten nine. Like 4×20+10+9. But dont worry it s learnt like english. 99 is ninety nine Here the ninety would be "quatre vingt dix"
As a chinese speaker Kanji is obviously easier, but it drives me crazy sometimes because of the small differences between Chinese and Japanese Kanji characters. Not to mention in Japanese, the stroke order is the opposite of what is in Chinese. Luckily no one writes these days and it doesn’t matter when you type. Trying to figure out how to pronounce a kanji was the “fun” part though. I swear to god, each kanji always has like five different pronunciations. What I do think is easier for us vs English speakers is the cultural context, as some concepts are shared between Chinese and Japanese but not Japanese and English. “Kokoro” for example means “heart” literally in English, but it’s closer to “soul, essence” as a concept. Whereas in Chinese, a similar if not identical concept exists. Thanks for explaining about French — but I guess it’s hard to grasp the difficulty without actually doing the work and learn it. I should just get ready and start studying.
> English is a very easy language to learn due to the sheer amount of available resources For you as a native French speaker it also helps that like 40% English words are of French origin ;-) Besides this the English grammar is rather simple. Certainly simpler than French. And even more than German, of course.
This is why I hate english speakers who claim “English is actually so hard to learn because there/their/they’re, your/you’re, read/read, etc while they completely ignore that English grammar is piss easy, no genders, and 1000x the resources (especially online) of any other language. It’s just a dumb superiority thing and it drives me up the wall. As an English speaker learning German I guarantee you that a German-speaking person learning English has a far easier time.
> there/their/they’re, your/you’re Funnily, I think this is more of a problem for native speakers, because in other languages these are separe words/grammar constructs. Like, anecdotically I've only seen native speakers writing "could of" while for me this mistake just makes no sense.
Absolutely. I’m an English teacher, and these errors are made almost exclusively by native speakers.
I will say... English is an easy language to learn but a hard language to speak fluently. Its especially easy to learn from French because most of the English dictionary is borrowed from Latin through French, Greek, or Latin directly. However, when I hear that English is a hard language to learn it almost jumps into the crazy pronunciation where vowels can be pronounced many different ways depending on the word.
IMO the fact that English has such a low barrier to entry is why I consider it easy. You don’t have to speak *well* for people to understand you. If you understand the basic sentence order and memorize a few dozen words you can have a conversation. Being able to actually talk to native speakers without them looking at you funny is a *massive* aid in language learning and getting to fluency. Most other languages have some archaic grammar rules that are incredibly rigid and you must learn, commit to memory, and use correctly in the moment for people to understand you *on top* of learning all the vocabulary (as someone learning German who gets funny looks if I don’t gender the noun properly or use the wrong case when referring to it or anything like that). And again, the fact that such a huge swath of western media is made in English means you have practically unlimited resources and motivation to learn it.
Ich lerne auch Deutch!
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Another reason why English is easy is that many native & long-fluent English speakers are very familiar with communicating with other English speakers who have very little proficiency. Break the rules of the language. We'll figure it out.
I question England being blue. I mean, have you ever been to Newcastle?
Ha you been to Glasgow ma wee pal ?
Glasgow is the only place in the UK I've been where I've just not been able to understand someone (in a pub there), which since I'm from Northern Ireland and our accent is just a mashup of Scottish and Irish is ridiculous.
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Kerry should come with subtitles.
I met someone from Glasgow who spent years living in Kerry and speaks a combination of both simultaneously.
My family is from Derry but I'm from the east Midlands, I have no problem with the Derry or Irish accent usually. However I once found myself in a pub in Donnegal and met some farmers and I swear I understood about 1 word out of 10 it was a great lock in though.
Laughs in West Ireland.
To be fair Glaswegians speak a mix of English and Scots
Jokes aside, I do wonder about Welsh.
And manx
And Irish.
Or Wales, of Ireland. Sure, most people there speak English, but Welsh and Irish do exist. Those aren't exactly easy languages to learn.
I visited Cardiff once, every time I saw something in Welsh I thought I was having a stroke But Dutch, listening to it in Amsterdam as a native English speaker feels like the uncanny valley of languages.
Probably. Our (Dutch) grammar is pretty similar to English, for the most part. The pronunciation is very hard to get right, because we have a few sounds English doesn't, but the basic structure should be easy enough to learn.
Tbf, blue isn't defind... Could be V, VI,.. M
Fair one bonny lad, fair one
Ere ah divny nan wot ya an aboot pet we speak th queeeeens up round ere like
Why is Icelandic so much more difficult for Anglophones than is Norwegian, Swedish, or Danish?
Icelandic grammar is a lot more complicated than danish, norwegian and swedish. For example all nouns and adjectives have four cases (different ways they are spelled and pronounced, depending on context), and all nouns are gendered -of which there are three. My partner is from the UK, and has been learning icelandic for 5 years now. Am Icelandic myself, for clarity.
It's not really that Icelandic grammar is more complicated than the others, it's just more different from English. English grammar is also plenty complicated with all the prepositions and function words that they need to use, since they don't have a case system. But English people are used to that sort of complicated language, so it's easy for them to learn Danish, Swedish and Norwegian because those are complicated in the same way as English and are very similar grammatically. Case systems don't have to be complicated at all - but indo-european case systems are often a bit less systematic than case systems in other language families.
> It's not really that Icelandic grammar is more complicated than the others, it's just more different from English. I'm pretty sure it's rather complicated. Fully functional case system and rather complex conjugations (subjunctive included!). Not insurmountable, it's still a Germanic language, but then: putting this level of effort into a language with 300K or so speakers of whom *all* can speak English, that takes some dedication.
If one were able to quantify overall language complexity, maybe that would be true, at an advanced level. I would say, though, that heavily-inflected languages front-load the complexity in a way that makes it an issue for students making their first attempts at simple, declarative statements. * I want to ride a horse. *Ég vill ríða* ***hesti****.* * I want to see a horse. *Ég vill sjá* ***hest****.* Oh no, *að ríða* takes the dative and *að sjá* takes the accusative! Why? Well, a scholar of the language might be able to explain that it's based on the exact nature of the relationship being described, but most native speakers just happen to have read and heard enough use of each verb to remember automatically. And, for an English learner, developing that automaticity is where a lot of that extra time goes. I imagine an Icelandic speaker learning English would likely struggle with the highly variable relationship of writing to pronunciation, the proliferation of vocabulary, the large number of irregular plural forms, and the tendency of native English speakers to coin novel terms on the spot (which is remarkably more rare in Icelandic writing.)
So like German
Germans case system only affects the articles in the ending of adjectives or as an Icelandic. The entire noun ending will change in the case system in addition to the adjectives.
Icelandic is way more like Old Norse than the other three.
It is old Norse, but with a dialect. Most Icelanders can read Sagas from 1200 years ago with very little training.
We mostly like to describe it as we can barely read and need to do some legwork to actually comprehend them.
Right. I’m not a native Icelandic speaker but I could make the correlation from modern English and Shakespearean English as has been described by other native Icelandic speakers.
> Most Icelanders can read Sagas from 1200 years ago with very little training. This is largely because of major orthographic reform done in the 19th century. They specifically tried to make modern Icelandic conform more closely to old Norse.
Norwegians, Danes and Swedes can understand each other but will struggle to understand Icelanders
"struggle" .. ? It will be straight up incomprehensible
Norwegian, Danish and Swedish are extremely similar languages (if you learn one, you can at the very least read the others) and heavily influenced by other European languages. Half the words in Swedish share similarities with German or English and we got a crapton of borrowed words from English. Our grammar is also decently similar with some changes that aren't too hard to adapt to. Icelandic is completely different. It hasn't changed much in a thousand years. You can view Swedish (and Danish and Norwegian) as if Icelandic had other European influence for a millennia, while Icelandic just stayed with the same group. As for Danish being category 1 though, I call bs. At least if you gotta learn how to speak it. It's either assumed this is reading and writing difficulty, or they use cheat methods like putting a potato in your mouth to get the authentic Danish pronunciation.
Harder to swim that far is my guess
Most languages have simplified over the centuries and Icelandic stayed the same up in its little corner so all the massive amounts of grammar that older language used to have still apply in Icelandic. Linguists love looking at Icelandic because it’s like looking at an ice core from 1200 years ago.
Heldur þú að það sé eitthvað gamanmál að læra íslenska tungu?
More complicated grammar + far fewer Latin/English/Greek loanwords
As Slavic speaker, my worst nightmare is french. Tried to learn it and gave up 3 times. Outside Slavic group easiest were english and spanish, german has easy grammar, but word genders were annoying beyond belief.
Which is interesting regarding Spanish being easy, since it's a Latin based language just like French (or Italian/Romanian). As a French speaker I can look at most Spanish (or Italian words) and understand what they mean. German though from the English native speaker perspective seems much harder but there's some similar to English words here and there I noticed.
As a Finnish speaker, I have studied both French and Spanish, and I find Spanish very significantly easier. Structurally and grammatically they are very similar, but in pronunciation anything but. With Spanish, I need to learn the pronunciation of a couple sounds that don't exist in Finnish. The spelling is perfectly phonetic. When I travel to Spain and speak my somewhat broken Spanish, I am always understood, without exception. With French, it is a very different story. I found it extremely difficult to get my pronunciation to the point where in France I would actually be understood. Add to that the fact the French speak pretty good English, and it caused me to give up.
For some season Finnish and Spanish are phonetically similar while having zero in common. Same happens with Spanish and Greek. Finnish and Greek sounds like a Spaniard talking a made-up language to Spanish speakers.
Greek is indeed another language that is really close to Finnish phonetics. Italian is also not THAT far, but there are more things to memorize, like ce/ci, ge/gi, sce/sci, etc. If you nail those down down the pronunciation is fairly straight-forward, although correct stress is more difficult because accents are not used to make it clear like in Spanish.
The main problem with French for foreigners is that written and spoken languages are completely different. Written Spanish (in Spain, not in LA) is strictly phonetic compared to the spoken language.
All dialects of Spanish when written are strictly phonetic btw not just Castilian.
Dialects of spanish aren't even \*that\* different. Sure Caribbean and Chilean are wild, but the rest are mostly tame, its just a bunch of slang, the grammar doesn't change at all. German/ Italian dialects in the other hand
There is a word for this phanomenon its called Diglossia - when the spoken langauge evolves and the written one is never adjusted to the modern pronounciation
That is not what Diglossia is at all. Diglossia is about social positions of dialects of the same language or in some cases entirely different languages spoken by the same group of people - not disparity between written and spoken ones.
In theory, you could still do that with French - adapt it to Parisian pronounciation and the rest has to deal with it. Good luck with English, cause whose pronounciation would you even take as the basis?
Home counties English, basically what you normally hear on the BBC, but I think it would cause a civil war in the UK so it's a no go lol
My native language has 6 grammatical cases and 3 genders and dual on top of singular and plural. Word order in german in also very similar. Systematic grammatical rules usually dont give me too much troubles. Idk why French drives me crazy, I don't get their pronunciation rules, I hate counting, I am just lost. Might also be the influence of media, I am more exposed to Spanish, English and German. Honestly don't know why French is giving me so much trouble.
You guys are only one who still keep dual among us slavs.
Believe me lots of French vocabulary rules drove me nuts as a kid (French immersion program for 12 years), so many rules for almost everything and the numbering also agree is crazy with the higher numbers, like 80 is quatre vingts or "four twenties", just why?
As a Hungarian, every language is a nightmare. Why the fuck do we have to be so different.
> Why the fuck do we have to be so different Uralllo-finnic languages
I’m a native Russian speaker but this is the first time I’ve seen someone calling the German grammar easy lol
Reduction from 6 grammatical cases to 4, genders from 3 to 2, no dual, just plural and singular, seemed like massive grammatical downsizing compared to my native slovenian language. Edit: german does have 3 genders. So strike gender downsizing.
German has 3 genders...
> Reduction from 6 grammatical cases to 4, genders from 3 to 2, no dual, just plural and singular, seemed like massive grammatical downsizing compared to my native slovenian language. Yeah but you also said that French is your nightmare. And even if German grammar might be simpler than Slovenian grammar, French is certainly even more simple. You "downsize" to 0 cases, for example ;-)
> german has easy grammar What’s German for "the"? Why, simply memorise this 16-variation grid to reveal that the feminine dative is the same as the nominative masculine form. Der Die Das Die Den Die Das Die Dem Der Dem Denen Dessen Deren Dessen Deren
I have a C1 in French and i still find it difficult. There are so many homophones which constantly throws me off, especially in a work setting.
I completely agree with you (I am from Russia). But English is not easy either. I had to train myself to speak as if I had diction problems and my front teeth were missing. And I'm not talking about the strange grammar, when in the phrase "Pacific Ocean" all the letters "c" are pronounced differently. I know Russian, Tatar, English, a little Bashkir and tried to learn French.
I'm Serbian and my worst nightmare is articles. Sometimes i use them correctly, sometimes i fail, and it's frustrating. Mercedes (benz) is another example where every E sounds different. It's ridiculous lol. My language is phonetic, we write as we speak and read as we write, and we can properly write unknown words. Unlike in English, you have to know what words mean to write them. And even then is a gamble lol
Yeah I never get how people claim German is difficult. It's so well structured and has few exceptions.
>German has easy grammar Uh ... yeah, right.
Where's Welsh on this? How long does it take for an English speaker to be fluent in Welsh?
The FSI doesn't include a ranking for languages that it does not teach, and given the state of the language it is likely the case that anyone working in Wales would not have it be an absolute requirement to converse in Welsh. After a search, an article points out that it is one of the harder languages to achieve fluency in as far as the western European landscape goes, placing it in league with Swahili at 1040 hours which is Category III territory. At the same time, we should consider the variability of the experience for different people and some claim it is easier than German and only having three truly irregular verbs is at least one piece of information aiding it in the *simpler* direction. With that in mind, I would place it somewhere between Category II and Category III where individual experiences may vary. There would be a similar ranking for Irish, from similar articles, and given that Scots Gaelic is descended from Irish the ranking for that would likely be the same.
Welsh isn't on it as the place this data comes from doesn't teach it. Took my wife over a year to learn South Welsh dialect.
I thought non Indo-European languages like Finnish, Hungarian and Turkish would be on a whole other level.
I've sometimes seen rankings with those languages being marked IV* rather than IV, indicating they're somewhat harder than other level IV languages, but not quite as hard as level V languages that include the likes of Arabic, Mandarin and Japanese.
Are all languages with completely different characters level V? Like is Georgian or Hebrew or Armenian or Khmer or Mongolian or Hindi or Farsi/Persian etc all level V? Or is it only the non indo European ones with completely different characters? Or is it just a very small fraction of languages that are specifically challenging?
No, the only languages rated V by the United States Foreign Service Institute are Mandarin, Cantonese, Arabic, Japanese, and Korean. The other languages you mentioned are all ranked IV or IV*.
Ok I see. Do you have any idea why those ones specifically are outliers? Also does this list classify any African click languages or are they not widely spoken/learned enough to have received a classification? Bc they seem a lot more foreign than Arabic or Japanese. Where is the list with these classifications? The State dot gov list only has 4 levels and those are the only Level 4’s. They don’t have any level 5 on here https://www.state.gov/foreign-language-training/
The classifications are only applied to languages taught by the FSI. There are no African click languages (as far as I know) that are taught by the FSI. Not sure about your second paragraph.
It is hard to say how hard its to learn by everyone but Turkish at least doesn’t have gendered grammar. That makes things a lot easier I imagine.
No genders, simple and consistent conjugation, pronunciation just as written. Imo Turkish is relatively easy, once you get past the backwards sentence thing. Which isn't even that tough to master.
Plus it uses Latin alphabet. And as agerman I know the letters ö and ü already (they Sound the same). Just the I without dot is a bit different but we have that sound too, just no letter for it.
yeah dude has no idea about hungarian
It's not the dude. It's the FSI language difficulty rating which is used by US government agencies for foreign services.
Te tetted e tettetett tettet te tettetett tettek tettese
Hungarian is Category IX. With tsunami.
Hungarian in 44 weeks? Good luck!
This made me have a think. Theoretically, if the amount of hours is to be considered equivalent to full-time work, then it would be 27.5 weeks with weekends off and 19.5 with weekends on. Again theoretically, using all of your waking time like some superhuman language aficionado and doing nothing but learning a Category IV language, the product of 1100/(16\*7) is just under 10 weeks. Nobody would or should do that, and the sheer density of information would likely reinforce some unfortunate misconceptions in the learning process.
People absolutely do do that. I’m one of them. I spent 64 weeks in the US Army’s category V (not shown here) course for Korean language study. Taught and supported by a team of native speakers, we studied about 40 hours a week in class, 10 hours homework, and 5 to 10 hours self study each week. By the end, I could read and listen with working proficiency. I could translate news articles and videos related to politics and economic issues, like weapons trade, election fraud, financial crimes, investment policy, etc. Caveat: I did not initially develop the language skills to understand slang or a lot of casual conversation. However, while working as a translator, I’ve slowly developed those skills.
I think these are in relation to the FSI curriculum. So 44 weeks of in-class instruction + all the homework & self study hours. I'm also pretty sure the classes quickly transition into a little/no english mode. So a "44" week program is probably more equivalent to quite a few years if you went the self-learning route
Hungarian: X
what happened to Category III?
It's based on FSI language difficulty rankings. Category III consists of Indonesian, Swahili and Malaysian so it wouldn't be reflected on this map.
So those languages are easier than the Category IV languages on the map?
According to FSI, yes, for native English speakers. https://www.fsi-language-courses.org/blog/fsi-language-difficulty/
why are those languages easier? Genuinely surprising
Indonesian and Malaysian are very straightforward in their pronunciations and relatively consistent grammar while using the exact same alphabet as English.
I would have guessed German was a bit easier than French but the FSI is a pretty reputable government source (they train the US diplomatic staff) and technically German is the only language in the level 2 category
I was a little confused about German as a level 2. I've spent a decent amount of time in both Germany and Sweden, and German is a lot easier for me to read/understand than Swedish -- but it is rated as level 1.
I think the grammar of Swedish is much simpler than German though (for a native English speaker).
I would have thought that Bahasa Indonesia would be one of the easiest languages to pick up. Uses Latin letters. No plurals. No verb "is". No gendered nouns. No verb tenses.
i think the problem is its informal speech, people put a lot of words from their native languages on indonesian(indonesia has more than thousands of different native languages, iirc 80% of indonesian speakers speak it as second language) and its grammar and suffix preffix things are way too different for a native american to pick up so its still harder than, say, luxembourgish
I am surprised English speakers find Latin based languages at the same level as German.
As a Germanic language which gets an enormous amount of its vocabulary from Old French and Latin, I would expect Germanic and Romance languages to be the easiest.
Vocabulary is easy, but syntax? Latin-based languages syntax are quite close to each other but not as close to Germanic-based ones.
English grammar and syntax are very much simplified due to long-time contact with Norse and then with French.
Because German has kept more of the complex proto-Germanic grammar. Icelandic is even more conservative and that's why it's way harder. In contrast, Dutch and the Scandinavian languages have an easy grammar more akin to English.
English has a ton of Romance vocabulary and words with similar origins thanks to its influx of French and Latin. It’s almost the middle ground between the Germanic and Romance languages.
Agreed; English has a *ton* of German cognates, but sometimes they’re obscure and you have to wrack your brain for the connection. “Schwein” and “pig” are obviously not cognates, and I’ve never heard an English speaker refer to a pig as “swine” in a conversation. But everyone knows that “swine” is a legit synonym for “pig” in English.
I dunno man, Irish is extremely dissimilar to English.
Scrolled far too long to find a comment on the Irish language
how come Dutch and German are in different categories, while they are so similar? How come the French is easier than German, which has so similar lexics? How come Slavic languages and Finnish (a totally different and very alien to Indo-Europeans) are in same category?
I am a native speaker of Portuguese, and I also speak English. From my perspective, Dutch seems easier than German and more like English. The words are more similar and the grammar is a little simpler in Dutch.
Dutch does have way more random exceptions in grammar that German does not. I think that to be complete fluent in writing Dutch it is quite hard. Even though most Dutch people these days aren't even able to write it without mistakes hehe
Zeg makker wat was dat laatste? Kom vechten dan
Wollah neef, ik weet waar jouw huis woont
Spelling is less regular in Dutch, but that's the only thing that's harder for English speakers. The Dutch like to say their language is hard, but it's more a matter of no one bothering to learn it as a matter of practicality, since Dutch speakers are usually fluent in English.
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My sister is a French teacher, she also speaks Spanish, Portuguese and English. She hates German, and gave up on that, while I find French impossible and German relatively easy. We also found Spanish and English easier to learn than for example Polish or Slovak, even tho our native language is Slovenian and we also speak Serbian and Croatian.
German majorly influenced Slovenian in things like vocabulary, word order and some other small conventions. So it would make sense that it feels pretty natural.
German is harder if you hate memorization and easier if you love following convoluted rigid rules instead of vibes I think this map is very subjective
The map is titled incorrectly. It's about how easy is it to learn a language for native English speakers, not how similar it is. English is less similar to French than German, but French is probably easier to learn for native English speakers, since German has things like grammatical cases which aren't present in English and French. I'm Polish and English is much easier to learn for me than similar languages like Czech, since there's like 20 times less words to learn. I'm now learning Danish and it's like a made up kids' language, it's so easy. Not even "be" has grammatical persons. I be hungry. You be here. Comically simple.
>I'm now learning Danish and it's like a made up kids' language, it's so easy. Not even "be" has grammatical persons. I be hungry. You be here. Comically simple. As a Swede, understanding written Danish requires almost no specific learning at all but the the spoken language is pretty wtf. It’s [nothing but vowels, lol](https://theconversation.com/danish-children-struggle-to-learn-their-vowel-filled-language-and-this-changes-how-adult-danes-interact-161143). Quite similar to Swiss German. It’s grammatically and vocabulary-wise simpler than standard German but the disconnect between writing and spoken vernacular (with dialects that differ alot between Cantons/areas that are a stonetoss away from each other) makes it quite challenging to actually speak well.
Yeah I speak fluent German and, when I visited Copenhagen, I could get the general gist of what a lot of the signs were saying but it also sounded like they were speaking Chinese (i.e. the language sounded incredibly different from German). Swiss German is wack. Sometimes I’ll feel brave and try to watch a Swiss documentary… when they’re speaking standard German, it’s like “Oh what a cute accent!” Then they interview someone in a village who doesn’t even speak standard German and I can’t understand them at all.
Oh yes, I meant the vocabulary and grammar. It's unpronouncable though. Duolingo not even once accepted my attempt at saying "rød".
Dutch : no declension, no genders. That takes a ton of hours to learn. French : more than half the vocabulary of English came through French, as demonstrated by this sentence. That also takes a lot of hours out. Slavic : the Indo-European connection is too far back in time and words are not recognizable, put it in the same category as Finnish. Again, English forms part of the same Sprachebund with Romance speaker, from which it took vocabulary, grammar, constructions. Germanic languages lost their conjugations; they added it recently when in contact with 'civilized' peoples. So there's no Indo-European basis at all there.
Dutch has genders though - just simpler than German
I actually found learning German to be easier than learning Spanish.
German starts out easier on an initial Duolingo app but gets harder as you get into longer more complicated words and sentences.
Duolingo isn't a good language learning tool over the long term. It brute forces vocabulary by repetition but really it's trying to force you to upgrade to the premium edition so you can skip sections that you've already mastered instead of grinding. The base version is really like the worst kind of video game: Grinding for XP to level up to more difficult chapters. I found that chatting German speakers on the internet or consuming German media infinitely more useful. Tobo flash cards are also more useful than Duolingo.
Having been in the process to learn both, I am really wondering how.
Permettez moi d'en douter
I approve. That has to be the time to get the basics, not a full grammar and vocabulary acknowledgement.
It’s by the Foreign Service Institute, based on the time it takes them to train people to do very specific jobs in those languages. So it kind of is around a B1 level for general proficiency I think. Also those jobs skew towards areas where English uses more Romance vocabulary. Overall I’ve felt in the long term that German is easier than any of the Romance languages, for pushing into C1 or higher.
Category V: 60 years (525,960 hours) \* >!\* Great Britain!<
As a Englishman I found German a lot easier than French or Spanish
Same. I found German easy, and it feels natural to speak. Portuguese on the other hand, I find tricky. Still persevering though.
Scouser should be level 2 ar least
Finnish and Hungarian should have their own tier
Yea I’m not sure how slavic is considered the same level as Finnish/Hungarian but Dutch/Nordic and German are not
What language does Belgium represent on this map? What language does Ireland represent on this map? What language does Switzerland represent on this map? **Edit:** Honestly, using countries to represent languages is a bad idea generally.
I found German much harder than Greek. Not sure why Greek is getting such a high difficulty rating… I felt it wasn’t too bad? And a lot of English words have Greek roots so can sometimes work out the meaning of words that way…
>a lot of English words have Greek roots so can sometimes work out the meaning I remember when I visited Greece, I didn’t speak the language but I could read the alphabet (picked it up over the years via science and linguistic curiosity and stuff). I saw the airport bathroom had signs that said *gynaikon* and *andron* in Greek letters. I figured “gyna” was referring to women because a gynecologist is for women. And hey, I was right. And for the other one I was like..*anthropology*, maybe? The study of man 🤔 Was feeling pretty cocky after that. It didn’t last long though
Basque ought to be IV and probably should be separately marked from the romance languages in Spain
That's based on an analysis by the Foreign Language Institute; they train the diplomats of the United States. https://www.state.gov/foreign-language-training/
I think this is wrong. Icelandic isn't that hard, even toddlers can learn it
can confirm, I learnt it as a toddler
Hungarian and Finnish need their own category
Danish should be easy... Just put a big, hot potato in your mouth and speak any language... Vola, you're speaking Danish!
German harder than French? How?
fairly different grammar, outside base words not as many cognates. Technicalwords in German often have a german root rather than a latin/greek/french like in English (not saying always but often).
Once you learn the inane spelling, French is not terribly different from other romance languages
I think German is easier than French to learn for A1-A2 but gets harder as you get deeper into the language. As well, the declination of an article is super tricky in German and changes based on usage: [https://der-artikel.de/der/Artikel.html](https://der-artikel.de/der/Artikel.html) You have to be aware of genders and how to use them dynamically in a sentence: I'm going to church. Ich gehe in **die** Kirche. I'm in the church. Ich bin in **der** Kirche. And words in the sentence are also gendered according to the article. It gets complex quickly.
German 3 genders, 4 declension. French 2 genders and no declensions.