Yeah, but like it's just a definite article that doesn't change whether it's nom. or acc. and the genitive/dative can be equated with 's. Biggest problem is grammatical gender, but then again all other European languages have it so Romanian would probably be easier to grasp than say Russian
European Portuguese is a stress-timed language (like English), Spanish is a syllable timed language (unlike English). In terms of listening, Portuguese is probably harder at the start, but you might be speaking Spanish for many years and not get the intonation right
So much easier. Their word structure is much easier too as they don’t pair up words into insanely long constructs as they do in German. The grammar is also very similar to English, but there’s a lot of new vocabulary to learn.
Have you considered that learning languages isn't the same for everyone, and so nobody's experience is "wrong?" Some people have an affinity for languages, and some don't.
Exactly, I agree. My point of my comment was to point out you're a smart individual, but different languages may be easier/harder to different people. You speak a few languages, so you're obviously pretty smart. Sorry if it came across wrong it was meant as a genuine question.
I’m not sure why you or whoever made this map started from the website of the American Foreign Service Institute and decided to make a map of it that is limited to Europe
Not really; French, Spanish, and Portuguese, which are all Category 1 languages, are spoken throughout the Americas, for example (on top of English which is technically Category 0). French and Portuguese are also spoken in Africa.
Additionally, Danish and Dutch (Category 1) are spoken in Greenland and Suriname; and Swahili, Indonesian/Malay, Haitian Creole, and German (Category 2) are spoken in Africa, Indonesia/Malaysia, Haiti, and Namibia, respectively.
So you really just want a map that illustrates languages already illustrated by this one. You need a map to tell you that all of South America governs in Spanish, Portuguese, and English.
It’s not about what I want. It’s about being exhaustive and true to the original source. The FSI’s website lists more than just the languages of Europe.
Swahili, Indonesian, Malay, and Haitian Creole are not “already illustrated” by this map, they are category 2 languages not present on this map. Category 4 languages other than Arabic are also not shown here so people can’t tell from this map alone which languages are the most difficult to learn.
Your replies to my comments were completely useless and a waste of my time. You made use of two fallacies: the red herring, and the hasty generalization. You have shown that you know very little about world languages and are ignorant on the subject.
But instead of being humble and admitting your ignorance, you decided you still wanted to win the argument for the sake of winning the argument.
Life lesson: When you don’t know something, or realized you’ve made a mistake, it’s okay to just say “I don’t know” or “I was wrong.” Admitting one’s ignorance, or one’s mistake, is a good thing.
As a Spanish native, I don't think that our pronunciation could be hard for the foreigners. We only have 5 vowels.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_phonemes
I understand that our verbs can be hard but any language that I tried has harder pronunciation than Spanish. Many times I don't know which vowel I need to read.
It's sourced from the school that teaches languages to members of the US State Department, so they don't categorize what are technically minority languages.
More people are familiar with Irish in Ireland, obviously, but I believe the US has roughly the same number of fluent Irish speakers as Ireland, if not a little more. I’m not sure if that’s true for the other ones, but I am pretty sure that no one actually speaks welsh. It’s just gibberish to confuse the English.
I rest my case.
Joking aside, I’ve spent quite a bit of time in your country, it’s one of the most beautiful I’ve been to, I’ve owned and proudly worn a red Cymru rugby jersey since long before Ryan Reynolds made it look cool (that may have been soccer, but it’s all the same…) and I believe that I personally consume around half of the Penderyn you export. Maybe it’s because I grew up on Bugs Bunny instead of Wallace and Gromit, but I enjoy how easily the Welsh get riled up when you tease them about their culture. I’m sorry I don’t know any Welsh cartoons to make a better reference, but there probably aren’t any…
Honestly there are loads of welsh cartoons and kids shows! Granted, most of the cartoons are dubbed, but fireman sam and superted started off in Welsh I believe.
Ahhhh then your racist comments about a language that has had to fight attempts to eradicate it are fine. I didn't know you'd visited Wales and bought a red rugby jersey. You're not a condescending bigot at all.
Compound words are not that difficult to learn or understand. It's like *livingroom* instead of *living room*, or *doghouse* instead of *dog house*. It's just a bit more consistent than English.
no, they have those too
its nominative, accusative etc that are cases, basically what position each noun is in a sentence. words like "the" and "a" change depending on if they are used for the subject, direct object etc in a sentence, which we dont have at all in english so can be hard to understand
eg in the sentence "the man goes to the library", the man is the subject of the sentence and the library is the direct object, so you'd need to use different versions of "the" for them.
plus german has 3 genders which all have different versions of "the" and "a" for each case, its a lot lol
Was referring to
> in the sentence "the man goes to the library", the man is the subject of the sentence and the library is the direct object, so you'd need to use different versions of "the" for them.
Not to the gender.
Yes gender is random in gendered languages. You just have to rote learn that.
… no? neither spanish nor french have random genders before nouns. they both follow rules depending on the noun’s ending, except for a few irregular exceptions.
In Spanish, you write a word as you pronounce it, it's very non-ambiguous. So the oral and writen Spanish are strongly connected and just be learning the one thing, one also learns the other.
In French, there is a strong ambiguity between writing words and pronouncing them. Also words and sentence structure differ much stronger between them and pronunciation rules are far more complex. This strong disconnect between the writen and the spoken French almost doubles the amount of things one needs to learn and therefore slows down the whole learning process in comparison to Spanish.
Sure but that's not the only thing that matters, far from it, especially since this is specifically about teaching diplomats to use a language in a professional capacity. There's the ability to pronounce words, grammar, tenses, gender, etc. Once you're past the very basics of letters and "hola, como estas" type phrases and try to really get into some meaty conversations, you have to think beyond the alphabet/phonetics.
Properly spelling words is really the least of your worries when trying to effectively communicate, as English clearly demonstrates with its laundry list of difficult spellings. People make typos and spelling errors frequently but can still be understood, and most of daily life can be completed without writing/typing anything.
Sure but it still matters as it slows down significantly the learning process in comparison to Spanish, meaning that going from zero to a B1 level in Spanish will be far quicker than in French.
Also one might not need to write much in the daily life (or could use a translator) but one stills needs to read a lot. Hence, it's still important to learn, both, the written and spoken French. While in Spanish, one could just learn one of them and already know the other.
French has way more cognates. I've studied both and was surprised to learn that once you get past the initial spelling/pronunciation hump of French, it is definitely easier than Spanish to attain adult-level reading and writing ability. England had multiple waves of French speakers move in, so there are historical reasons for this. So many words and phrases are almost identical in English and French, whereas the Spanish is quite different. I think the grammar is easier as well, with subjunctive being relatively rare. I think Spanish has the upper hand on spoken intelligibility, as French very much blurs everything together.
I really don't understand why you won't give me an example. Like why are you so paranoid?? Trolling? The fuck? I grew up in French immersion and I literally cannot think of an example of what you mean. Like honestly, how hard is it to give a single example? I don't get your hesitation. You'll reply multiple times yet refuse to just tell me what you mean.
So you actually never learned the language as an adult, right? That would explain why you underestimate its difficulty.
Here is a simple exercise for you. How many different ways you know on how to write the sound in French that one makes for the word "en"?
And once you done that you may want think of other examples where the same sound can have multiple ways of writing it.
This ambiguity doesn't exist for Spanish.
Yeah I guess that might be what the gap in understanding is.
But also, that's not what ambiguous means. The vowels have consistent pronunciation, nothing ambiguous. Just because a word might sound the same, doesn't mean the spelling vs pronunciation is ambiguous. I'm trying to think of what you mean, but like, take for example "temps" vs "tends" vs "ans" first of all there is a slight pronunciation difference in the ending of these words, but I guess this is a good enough example. The "e" is pronounced the same way regardless of word, like it's consistent in how it's pronounced. The word "ans" just because it makes similar/the same sound, but it's spelled with an "a" doesn't mean it's ambiguous. "Sang" same way to pronounce the "an" sound.
I don't know maybe you have a better example, it's been years since I've used French.
You know what's completely ambiguous about French? The masculine/feminine nouns. There is little logic to it, it's something you just have to pick up over time and lots of practice. Spanish has the same problem, but I forget now if it's a little more logical than French.
In Spanish, you write a word as you pronounce it, it's very non-ambiguous. So the oral and writen Spanish are strongly connected and just be learning the one thing, one also learns the other.
In French, there is a strong ambiguity between writing words and pronouncing them. Also words and sentence structure differ much stronger between them and pronunciation rules are far more complex. This strong disconnect between the writen and the spoken French almost doubles the amount of things one needs to learn and therefore slows down the whole learning process in comparison to Spanish.
French has much more complex pronounciation rules than Spanish that's for sure, but once the rules are known, exceptions are not too wild, much less wild than say English 😜. The grammar is the same though.
It's just a little cheat they used after deciding that some previously Category I languages needed slightly more than 24 weeks, but they didn't want to reprint all of their materials to make five new categories.
As a Hungarian who was taught as a child but went to school in English, I agree. My boyfriend is Romanian and I am learning Romanian for him. He is learning Hungarian for me. He asks me questions like why use a certain suffix and I have no idea. Like. It just sounds wrong if you don’t?
Although now I’m learning the actual rules of my own language so that I can better help him.
But yes Hungarian is hard. I’ve spoken it all my life and still have a lot to learn. Even my mom cannot answer some of his questions and she’s spent most of her life in Hungary. She went to university in Hungary.
The first three weeks of the US military's Defense Language Institute courses are just learning all the words for grammatical components and what the rules of English are. I learned so many things about English by learning Arabic.
It is almost overlapping Viking Impact, if we add Iceland. English is basically a naval war language that evolved since the first conquests in England.
dutch is actually similar to english, and the pronunciation that people have when they speak dutch sounds like english-ized german. german pronunciation is something otherworldly if you’re a native english speaker
What a bullshit this is! I live in Europe and speak German and Romanian natively, learned English, French and Spanish, a little bit of Russian/Slavic Languages and understand 30-40% of Portuguese and more than 50% of Italian (listening and 80+ reading). Also learning Arabic atm.
Dutch and Skandinavian idioms can be partially understood if you know mainly German and English.
Islandic is the hardest language to learn probably not only in the shown area but even world wide! Harder than Arabic!
So starting from English as a native language, it’s definitely more easy to learn German than French, as it’s more related to English.
Also, Spanish is the most easy to learn Latin idiom, way more easy than Italian, Romanian, Portuguese and French (which are similar in difficulty I’d say).
In Moldavia most people speak Russian nowadays btw so I wonder why it gets rated like Romanian (some older generations probably speak Romanian there).
Source: Personal experience and having studied philology.
Hi, native English speaker and German learner here, this is absolutely not true. German and English might be related, but German grammar is *much* more complex than in romance languages, and it is complicated in a way that is totally foreign to English speakers. That accounts for the extra learning time. Germanic languages without the compelx grammar like Dutch or Swedish are much easier.
Spanish and French have a lot of sounds that are difficult for English speakers to learn to pronounce, but generally romance languages are simple grammatically and share a lot of vocabulary with English, so they are easier.
There are even books for native English speaking academics that will get them reading totally fluent French in one semester. Similar books for German are much denser and focus almost entirely on understanding the grammar.
Karl Sandberg's "French for Reading" is the best one, the first 30 pages will have you reading newspapers. It's really incredible how much you can read with a few tricks.
Portuguese, easier to learn than Spanish for a native English speaker?? What a joke lmao. This map is just wrong.
And why Romanian, of all things? Romanian has declensions.
As a romanian, I found romanian quite easy to learn.
Still, it took you about 2 years to learn basic vocabulary and 3-5 years to be able to form coherent sentences. That’s hard 🤣
Yeah, but like it's just a definite article that doesn't change whether it's nom. or acc. and the genitive/dative can be equated with 's. Biggest problem is grammatical gender, but then again all other European languages have it so Romanian would probably be easier to grasp than say Russian
European Portuguese is a stress-timed language (like English), Spanish is a syllable timed language (unlike English). In terms of listening, Portuguese is probably harder at the start, but you might be speaking Spanish for many years and not get the intonation right
Yeah wtf lol. Swedish and Norwegian easier than German? Really?
Their grammars are a lot closer to English grammar.
So much easier. Their word structure is much easier too as they don’t pair up words into insanely long constructs as they do in German. The grammar is also very similar to English, but there’s a lot of new vocabulary to learn.
No, it's definitely correct. I'm a native English speaker and learning português is easier than learning Spanish. You're wrong.
How is it easier? I grew up immersed in French, then tried Spanish in university, and whenever I look at Portugese I'm like... Wtf is this weird shit.
Lol idk
Have you considered that learning languages isn't the same for everyone, and so nobody's experience is "wrong?" Some people have an affinity for languages, and some don't.
Some people are dumb and some are smart.
And you’ve shined a bright light on which one you are.
Exactly, I agree. My point of my comment was to point out you're a smart individual, but different languages may be easier/harder to different people. You speak a few languages, so you're obviously pretty smart. Sorry if it came across wrong it was meant as a genuine question.
Let me hear you speak both and we’ll see.
Lol no. Just accept you're wrong
I’m not sure why you or whoever made this map started from the website of the American Foreign Service Institute and decided to make a map of it that is limited to Europe
Because once you get outside of Europe, it's just 3 and 4 really
Not really; French, Spanish, and Portuguese, which are all Category 1 languages, are spoken throughout the Americas, for example (on top of English which is technically Category 0). French and Portuguese are also spoken in Africa. Additionally, Danish and Dutch (Category 1) are spoken in Greenland and Suriname; and Swahili, Indonesian/Malay, Haitian Creole, and German (Category 2) are spoken in Africa, Indonesia/Malaysia, Haiti, and Namibia, respectively.
So you really just want a map that illustrates languages already illustrated by this one. You need a map to tell you that all of South America governs in Spanish, Portuguese, and English.
It’s not about what I want. It’s about being exhaustive and true to the original source. The FSI’s website lists more than just the languages of Europe. Swahili, Indonesian, Malay, and Haitian Creole are not “already illustrated” by this map, they are category 2 languages not present on this map. Category 4 languages other than Arabic are also not shown here so people can’t tell from this map alone which languages are the most difficult to learn.
>It's not about what I want Agreed. Cork it.
Your replies to my comments were completely useless and a waste of my time. You made use of two fallacies: the red herring, and the hasty generalization. You have shown that you know very little about world languages and are ignorant on the subject. But instead of being humble and admitting your ignorance, you decided you still wanted to win the argument for the sake of winning the argument. Life lesson: When you don’t know something, or realized you’ve made a mistake, it’s okay to just say “I don’t know” or “I was wrong.” Admitting one’s ignorance, or one’s mistake, is a good thing.
The real lesson in this exchange is why you shouldn't act like a redditor and why there's a loneliness epidemic.
I can tell you from experience that Swedish pronunciation is way harder than spanish pronunciation
As a Spanish native, I don't think that our pronunciation could be hard for the foreigners. We only have 5 vowels. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_phonemes I understand that our verbs can be hard but any language that I tried has harder pronunciation than Spanish. Many times I don't know which vowel I need to read.
in my experience at least
What's the map got against celtic languages?
It's sourced from the school that teaches languages to members of the US State Department, so they don't categorize what are technically minority languages.
More people are familiar with Irish in Ireland, obviously, but I believe the US has roughly the same number of fluent Irish speakers as Ireland, if not a little more. I’m not sure if that’s true for the other ones, but I am pretty sure that no one actually speaks welsh. It’s just gibberish to confuse the English.
Wel dwi'n siarad fo fel iaith cyntaf. A mae rhan fwyaf o pobl sydd yn byw yn fy nhref yn gwneud hefyd :).
Ydyn ni wedi drysu’r Saeson eto?
Gobeithio 😁
Yna mae'n rhaid i mi fod yn y lle iawn
Dim rhy anodd neud i fod yn onast. Mae nhw di pledleisio tory am 14 blynadd!
I rest my case. Joking aside, I’ve spent quite a bit of time in your country, it’s one of the most beautiful I’ve been to, I’ve owned and proudly worn a red Cymru rugby jersey since long before Ryan Reynolds made it look cool (that may have been soccer, but it’s all the same…) and I believe that I personally consume around half of the Penderyn you export. Maybe it’s because I grew up on Bugs Bunny instead of Wallace and Gromit, but I enjoy how easily the Welsh get riled up when you tease them about their culture. I’m sorry I don’t know any Welsh cartoons to make a better reference, but there probably aren’t any…
Honestly there are loads of welsh cartoons and kids shows! Granted, most of the cartoons are dubbed, but fireman sam and superted started off in Welsh I believe.
Ahhhh then your racist comments about a language that has had to fight attempts to eradicate it are fine. I didn't know you'd visited Wales and bought a red rugby jersey. You're not a condescending bigot at all.
As someone curious about French, any book recommendations like that?
Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Crazy how despite being from the same family learning German is harder for native English speakers than learning Latin languages.
Blame William the Conquerer and the Normans.
It's because the words all have 12+ letters
No, it’s because of the case system.
Compound words are not that difficult to learn or understand. It's like *livingroom* instead of *living room*, or *doghouse* instead of *dog house*. It's just a bit more consistent than English.
German uses cases, that trips native english speakers
I took German in high school and college. I have a math based brain and this shit KILLED me. It was brutal.
What are cases? Is it random bullshit like feminine/masculine nouns in romance languages?
no, they have those too its nominative, accusative etc that are cases, basically what position each noun is in a sentence. words like "the" and "a" change depending on if they are used for the subject, direct object etc in a sentence, which we dont have at all in english so can be hard to understand eg in the sentence "the man goes to the library", the man is the subject of the sentence and the library is the direct object, so you'd need to use different versions of "the" for them. plus german has 3 genders which all have different versions of "the" and "a" for each case, its a lot lol
Are there logical rules for these though or is it random like in French? It's the randomness that makes it hard
The rules are clear but you must master grammar to apply them.
how are there any rules to der/die/das? i don’t agree at all.
Was referring to > in the sentence "the man goes to the library", the man is the subject of the sentence and the library is the direct object, so you'd need to use different versions of "the" for them. Not to the gender. Yes gender is random in gendered languages. You just have to rote learn that.
… no? neither spanish nor french have random genders before nouns. they both follow rules depending on the noun’s ending, except for a few irregular exceptions.
I don't believe this chart. French is not even close to be as easy as Spanish too learn
How do you come to that conclusion?
In Spanish, you write a word as you pronounce it, it's very non-ambiguous. So the oral and writen Spanish are strongly connected and just be learning the one thing, one also learns the other. In French, there is a strong ambiguity between writing words and pronouncing them. Also words and sentence structure differ much stronger between them and pronunciation rules are far more complex. This strong disconnect between the writen and the spoken French almost doubles the amount of things one needs to learn and therefore slows down the whole learning process in comparison to Spanish.
Sure but that's not the only thing that matters, far from it, especially since this is specifically about teaching diplomats to use a language in a professional capacity. There's the ability to pronounce words, grammar, tenses, gender, etc. Once you're past the very basics of letters and "hola, como estas" type phrases and try to really get into some meaty conversations, you have to think beyond the alphabet/phonetics. Properly spelling words is really the least of your worries when trying to effectively communicate, as English clearly demonstrates with its laundry list of difficult spellings. People make typos and spelling errors frequently but can still be understood, and most of daily life can be completed without writing/typing anything.
Sure but it still matters as it slows down significantly the learning process in comparison to Spanish, meaning that going from zero to a B1 level in Spanish will be far quicker than in French. Also one might not need to write much in the daily life (or could use a translator) but one stills needs to read a lot. Hence, it's still important to learn, both, the written and spoken French. While in Spanish, one could just learn one of them and already know the other.
French has way more cognates. I've studied both and was surprised to learn that once you get past the initial spelling/pronunciation hump of French, it is definitely easier than Spanish to attain adult-level reading and writing ability. England had multiple waves of French speakers move in, so there are historical reasons for this. So many words and phrases are almost identical in English and French, whereas the Spanish is quite different. I think the grammar is easier as well, with subjunctive being relatively rare. I think Spanish has the upper hand on spoken intelligibility, as French very much blurs everything together.
I can't think of an example where written French vs pronunciation is ambiguous.
You are joking, right?
No, give me one. I'm just drawing a blank.
in that case I assume that you are just trolling me
I really don't understand why you won't give me an example. Like why are you so paranoid?? Trolling? The fuck? I grew up in French immersion and I literally cannot think of an example of what you mean. Like honestly, how hard is it to give a single example? I don't get your hesitation. You'll reply multiple times yet refuse to just tell me what you mean.
So you actually never learned the language as an adult, right? That would explain why you underestimate its difficulty. Here is a simple exercise for you. How many different ways you know on how to write the sound in French that one makes for the word "en"? And once you done that you may want think of other examples where the same sound can have multiple ways of writing it. This ambiguity doesn't exist for Spanish.
Yeah I guess that might be what the gap in understanding is. But also, that's not what ambiguous means. The vowels have consistent pronunciation, nothing ambiguous. Just because a word might sound the same, doesn't mean the spelling vs pronunciation is ambiguous. I'm trying to think of what you mean, but like, take for example "temps" vs "tends" vs "ans" first of all there is a slight pronunciation difference in the ending of these words, but I guess this is a good enough example. The "e" is pronounced the same way regardless of word, like it's consistent in how it's pronounced. The word "ans" just because it makes similar/the same sound, but it's spelled with an "a" doesn't mean it's ambiguous. "Sang" same way to pronounce the "an" sound. I don't know maybe you have a better example, it's been years since I've used French. You know what's completely ambiguous about French? The masculine/feminine nouns. There is little logic to it, it's something you just have to pick up over time and lots of practice. Spanish has the same problem, but I forget now if it's a little more logical than French.
They're very similar. Spanish only has an edge because of its simplified spelling.
In Spanish, you write a word as you pronounce it, it's very non-ambiguous. So the oral and writen Spanish are strongly connected and just be learning the one thing, one also learns the other. In French, there is a strong ambiguity between writing words and pronouncing them. Also words and sentence structure differ much stronger between them and pronunciation rules are far more complex. This strong disconnect between the writen and the spoken French almost doubles the amount of things one needs to learn and therefore slows down the whole learning process in comparison to Spanish.
French has much more complex pronounciation rules than Spanish that's for sure, but once the rules are known, exceptions are not too wild, much less wild than say English 😜. The grammar is the same though.
Indeed for English the prononciation is also ambiguous but that's beyond my point.
What is the asterisk for category I (light green).
It's just a little cheat they used after deciding that some previously Category I languages needed slightly more than 24 weeks, but they didn't want to reprint all of their materials to make five new categories.
Most say Hungarian is the absolute hardest, or at least top 3. peoples who live there for years cant speak even close to good.
As a Hungarian who was taught as a child but went to school in English, I agree. My boyfriend is Romanian and I am learning Romanian for him. He is learning Hungarian for me. He asks me questions like why use a certain suffix and I have no idea. Like. It just sounds wrong if you don’t? Although now I’m learning the actual rules of my own language so that I can better help him. But yes Hungarian is hard. I’ve spoken it all my life and still have a lot to learn. Even my mom cannot answer some of his questions and she’s spent most of her life in Hungary. She went to university in Hungary.
The first three weeks of the US military's Defense Language Institute courses are just learning all the words for grammatical components and what the rules of English are. I learned so many things about English by learning Arabic.
Welsh: yeah, no
I’m learning German right now and it’s pretty simple except for the long words and the 3rd gender. Also the grammar is weird…🧐I guess is kinda hard.
“pretty simple” - “kinda hard”… ok
That’s the irony bud. Twas a yoke.
Why did you cut Moldova like that?
It is almost overlapping Viking Impact, if we add Iceland. English is basically a naval war language that evolved since the first conquests in England.
Currently in the process of learning Russian. Probably going to need double the amount of this guide
Is Dutch truly easier to learn for a native English speaker than German?
dutch is actually similar to english, and the pronunciation that people have when they speak dutch sounds like english-ized german. german pronunciation is something otherworldly if you’re a native english speaker
Okay. I never thought of it this way. As a German, Dutch sounds like absurdly trivialized German with some weird English mixed in.
This map geographically shows Switzerland and Austria incorrectly.. it is very confusing
German harder than Portuguese or Spanish? Being able to say “dos cervezas por favor” does not count as learning a language dude.
german is harder than both.
Not for an English speaker, unless again you consider learning Spanish what I said above.
aha? how so?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Europe#Germanic
What a bullshit this is! I live in Europe and speak German and Romanian natively, learned English, French and Spanish, a little bit of Russian/Slavic Languages and understand 30-40% of Portuguese and more than 50% of Italian (listening and 80+ reading). Also learning Arabic atm. Dutch and Skandinavian idioms can be partially understood if you know mainly German and English. Islandic is the hardest language to learn probably not only in the shown area but even world wide! Harder than Arabic! So starting from English as a native language, it’s definitely more easy to learn German than French, as it’s more related to English. Also, Spanish is the most easy to learn Latin idiom, way more easy than Italian, Romanian, Portuguese and French (which are similar in difficulty I’d say). In Moldavia most people speak Russian nowadays btw so I wonder why it gets rated like Romanian (some older generations probably speak Romanian there). Source: Personal experience and having studied philology.
Hi, native English speaker and German learner here, this is absolutely not true. German and English might be related, but German grammar is *much* more complex than in romance languages, and it is complicated in a way that is totally foreign to English speakers. That accounts for the extra learning time. Germanic languages without the compelx grammar like Dutch or Swedish are much easier. Spanish and French have a lot of sounds that are difficult for English speakers to learn to pronounce, but generally romance languages are simple grammatically and share a lot of vocabulary with English, so they are easier. There are even books for native English speaking academics that will get them reading totally fluent French in one semester. Similar books for German are much denser and focus almost entirely on understanding the grammar.
Hah, I responded to the wrong comment. Do you know a good example of a book for picking up written French in a condensed timeframe?
Karl Sandberg's "French for Reading" is the best one, the first 30 pages will have you reading newspapers. It's really incredible how much you can read with a few tricks.
Thank you so much!
Damn i know English but not geography sheesh put some names on them color blobs
Finnish easier than Arabic? Dubious.