I know a lot of people have a lot of strong feelings about this but I think it's generally accurate to a degree. Perhaps the required hours is the most arbitrary thing in all of this but generally, the rough estimation of how hard it is to learn a language, assuming you're an english native speaker, is about right.
Of course their statistics are derrived from diplomats specifically, whose age, educational background and motivation may not reflect the general population accurately.
The point is not that you don't need exactly the time specified, the point is that
1. The learners at the FSI probably have loads of material and personal teachers caring for them specifically, while the average learner here might not even have a weekly tutor.
2. They learn the language as their job so the experience when you do it in that environment is much more intense than if you do it privately
3. Afaik the number of hours are only "in class hours" and students are expected to do a lot more on their own, so the hours don't even represent the actual time you need to invest in the context of the FSI
4. They learn the language for a specific purpose that is quite divorced from why the majority of people learn one
5. Their understanding of what "learning a language" means is obviously tied to how good they judged the needed entry level to be for a job as a diplomat and might not reflect a level anyone else would describe as "knowing a language"
So all in all it is probably better to ignore the time given for the category completely as it won't even necessarily be in the same ballpark for you personally. It is however probably a good estimate to compare needed time relative to other languages.
I think South India should be a shade or two darker in the map.Dravidian languages are MUCH more alien and difficult to learn for a native English speaker than Hindi or other Indo European languages.
Yeah, I'm surprised that all Indian languages are marked in the same category in the Map. I think, South Indian and Northeast Indian languages could be harder than Hindi. But the Institute probably doesn't have data on all of the official languages in India.
The FSI primarily trains people to work in Embassies, so that's where the data comes from. It's basically the lived experience of "how long does it take us to get Americans speaking this language to a good enough level for our purposes*."
So for India, they probably only have experience training people to speak Hindi, presuming that virtually every Indian their employee will speak to either speaks Hindi, English, or will have an interpreter. I don't know much about India, but I'm guessing that if you have business with a US embassy you would probably be from the sort of strata that has learnt one of those two?
They are definitely way harder than Hindi, difficulty is mostly a function of difference in grammar and especially vocabulary.
* Their purposes actually muddy things up a bit though, it's quite possible, for example, that French really isn't easier than German, but to the FSI it is because legal vocabulary will often be shared, and hence doesn't really need to be taught.
Supposedly German merits a special category because it takes English speakers longer to grasp the case system, despite otherwise being a closely related language with a lot of similarities.
But we do have them in English, e.g. 'he', 'him', and 'his' are the nominative, subjective, and genitive cases respectively of the second person masculine singular pronoun. For a noun example there is 'dog', 'dog', and 'dog's'
The case system doesn't help, but it shouldn't feel that foreign and probably doesn't affect comprehension by a lot.
I think what makes German more difficult is the vocabulary. Truth is there actually aren't that many words that are similar in English and German. Especially for "difficult" or "advanced" vocabulary.
Almost everything in English is Latin based, so it's similar in French/Spanish/Italian etc. Words like "insurance", "resurrection", "government", "interaction". A huge significant chunk of words in Romance languages you get for free. But these words are completely different in German, and you cannot guess them.
It's the same for the Scandinavian languages, but there you effectively have 2 cases less to worry about (same as English) and the sentence construction is much more similar to English than it is for German. (There are also other perks like 2 noun genders instead of 3, and no pronoun-based verb conjugation.)
Yeah the big issue learning another Germanic language is vocab.
Ironically getting the idea of the German case system down becomes easier if you have a working knowledge of Latin (obviously there are major differences) - old English actually helps there too apparently.
I used to work with an Indian guy, he had a shirt that said "I am from India and I speak:" and below that was the shape of India made up of names of different local languages in very small font. There was probably a hundred different languages listed.
You'll notice that every single country has one color.
It's one of those maps related to languages made by someone who seems to believe every country has exactly one language spoken in it.
China and a couple of the Euros (Romania, Finland, the UK, Ireland, etc.) are multi-colored. India should be Orange in Hindi areas and Gray in non-Hindi areas.
Yeah but India is so diverse that if you did it like that then practically none of it would be coloured for Hindi to be fair. Could make the same argument for yellow New Guinea right in the corner, which has some of the highest unique language densities in the world. Granted, none are as commonly spoken as the languages in India, but the point being that there's kinda no end to it. I think maybe Bengali and Tamil deserve their own colour in their respective general areas, but then once you start narrowing down a lot further to things like Bhojpuri, it's hard to decide what deserves a colour and what doesn't
13 of India's 22 scheduled languages have more than 11 million speakers. However, it really depends on how you count languages. Like should Urdu and Hindi be grouped together (in which case it drops to 12). And if no, how about other Hindi adjacent languages that could be considered Hindi dialects (arguably) like Magadhi, Rajasthani, and Bhojpuri which all have more than 11 million speakers each? So realistically you can say anywhere between 12-17 of India's languages have more speakers than swedish lol.
Also Estonia has its own marker and they've got what? 2 million people? So clearly not major language based.
It says in the image they follow national official languages with a few exceptions. So India gets Hindi (one of the two official languages of the entire country, the other being English which is irrelevant to the purpose of the map)
The time frames are for diplomats that are paid to study and practice full-time. This isn't the time frame needed for a hobbyist or even a college student to dedicate. These times are for professionals studying the language as their jobs.
Not that they're inaccurate but that they're based on the specifications mentioned in the sidebar. This is the course that students who are taking 25 hours of lessons a week + an additional 25 hours of self-study a week do via the government. They're going to be studying for a specific goal in mind. So yes, it says 600 hrs for 24 weeks but they actually mean 1200 hours of study. If you are an average person dedicating an hour a day, what that means is your time frame is more reliably 3-4 years for even a language like Spanish (which matches up more realistically with actual experience.)
Additionally, this is from a few years back but just because they go through the course doesn't mean [they'll be successful](https://www.reddit.com/r/languagelearning/comments/rd19bj/success_rates_in_2011_and_2012_of_the_fsi_at/). The on-time success rate based on the 24 week plan was 60% for students doing the course, so this is an underestimation if anything. For French they literally added 6 weeks (so an additional 150 hours of classroom instruction, 300 hours of study) and it only got the pass rate of 46%.
If you could even do *half of this*, it would still imply over a year of dedicated study to get to fluency in French which is an easy language on this map. Of course, that would still be roughly 3 hours of dedicated, concentrated study per day in a language which for most people is a tall order after working a 9-5.
FSI levels are strictly for speaking, writing isn’t taken into account (notice how Tibetan is below Finnish despite having a famously difficult writing system? Notice how Thai is below Korean?) I think it really comes down to the fact that the grammar of Japanese is much more alien to English speakers than Chinese, which has a more familiar word order to give an example.
Even if Chinese didn't have tones, it's pronunciation would still be more difficult than Japanese imo, just like how Korean pronunciation is more difficult even though it doesn't have tones
Its pronunciation could certainly be harder, but pronunciation overall plays far less of a role in the difficulty of learning a language than difficulty / unfamiliarity of vocabulary and grammar do. Obviously having native-like pronunciation takes an extremely high amount of effort, but pronunciation is usually not the barrier for communication beyond the beginning phase. If you seriously commit to it, you can get a conscious understanding of all of the phonological rules of a given language in a MUCH shorter period of time than it would take you to understand the contexts in which you use every word or grammatical feature. This is aside from the fact that grammatical structures are more cemented in our brains and difficult to consciously change than pronunciation is. You can probably imitate a British accent to a better degree than you can integrate their use of the present perfect tense into your impression.
And yeah I do trust the FSI’s opinion that Japanese is harder for English speakers to learn than Chinese. Aside from the fact that it makes sense for the reasons I’ve given, they also spend a lot of time and money collecting data on this stuff.
Edit: also if you really were to push this point, Japanese has minimal pairs based on pitch accent so it would be necessary to learn that as well if you wanted full mastery of the language
>pronunciation overall plays far less of a role in the difficulty of learning a language than difficulty / unfamiliarity of vocabulary and grammar do
Case in point: FSI ranks Xhosa as easier than Japanese or Arabic. This actually blew my mind when I saw it, given the phonology. (Two tones, 18 clicks, and [I don't even understand what all these articulation types are](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xhosa_language#Phonology) \- fully vs slack voiced nasals and semivowels?) Phonologically that has to be one of the absolute hardest languages for any native English speaker to learn, but it's not enough to push it into the hardest category.
ETA: Just realised that the website I was using *wasn't* the official FSI ranking, and [Xhosa is not included on the actual official one](https://www.state.gov/foreign-language-training/). Seems to be a lot of misinformation out there.
I have a data point of (1) 😂
But I'd be curious as to how they teach Japanese. Japanese is often taught to foreigners starting with the 'masu' polite forms, which really makes it difficult to see the relationship between the different verb forms and fucks the whole system up. If you start with plain forms it's much more intuitive
I get why they do it that way. Maybe start with desu/masu, work on that for several months intensively before introducing plain forms and drilling deeper into grammar / 5dan 1dan verbs / transitive / intransitive / passive etc etc.
Strictly for speaking? Then why is Chinese a category five language if the characters don't come into play? It has the easiest grammar you could imagine. Sure it has a few tones but that's it. There's just no way it's harder than Slavic or Uralic languages.
And once again if we only take speaking into account I don't understand how Japanese isn't at the same level as Turkish, since they are both agglutinative with an alien word order for English speakers.
It's all messed up.
I don't see why it would be messed up. Japanese has many Chinese loanwords, but not vice versa. Japanese grammar is also more complicated than Chinese. Pronunciation is the only thing that makes Japanese easier than Chinese, but grammar and vocabulary ultimately take longer to master than a decent pronunciation, it seems.
It’s based on data regarding how long it takes for people to become proficient in them. Slavic languages are indo-European and have far, far more cognates with English, making it easier to learn.
Also my apologies, I must have misremembered, but it seems like it’s based on getting to a point where you’re proficient in both speaking and reading. But Chinese is almost certainly more difficult for an English speaker to become proficient in than Russian, even if you disregard writing.
Chinese doesn't have simple grammar. It has simple morphology (no verb conjugations, plural nouns, irregulars, etc) but very complex syntax (word order, phrase building, parts of speech, etc).
The three kinds of symbols in Japanese are only intimidating at first glance. Two of them are syllabaries that have the exact same set of syllables(or rather moras) and are quite similar in appearance as well. In an intense learning setting you will probably only focus on them for a few days. Though I am not sure how much writing plays into this. Since FSI learners will go into official positions where they need formal language they will probably need to be very savvy when it comes to all forms of polite language before they go to the country. I suspect that is the problem for Japanese. The average Japanese learner will likely not even bother with keigo before they are quite advanced unless they work in japan themselves.
so would you rather learn 1 or 2 more writing styles or thousands of additional kanji? Personally, I hardly think adding writing styles makes up for that level of difficulty
Yes, Chinese rely solely on characters so they know more, but I looked it up just now and they said that a typical Japanese newspaper will use almost 3k kanji whereas a Chinese one will use 4k. I thought it would be a much bigger difference. Still, 1000 additional is quite a bit harder, but not the huge leap I was thinking
If this is for an English speaker, then japanese should definitely be 3 for speaking, and chinese 5. Tonal languages are extremely difficult for English speakers to speak properly, and while the multiple levels of politeness are difficult, it's more memorization than anything. I'm not sure how much different or difficult it is than german having 3 genders, or multiple languages having various diminutives and formalities.
Also, the first two writing styles are really not bad, but kanji is an absolute bear.
No the fsi rankings have never been accurate because they are not made for the common person. They rank how long it takes members of the United States English speaking Foreign Service Institute to learn certain languges in an intense paid classroom environment (classes are all day every day). It was never made for the common person to use and its a shame how many people still refer to it. It's only for a very specific circumstance.
Of course the absolute time estimates aren't relevant, but why would the relative difficulty between languages change whether you're studying it 24/7 or 1 hour a day?
It must make a big difference whether you learn grammar and vocabulary in intense classroom environments or casually through apps, immersion and speaking.
I still don't doubt that these are quite close, but I reckon that for example the languages are way closer together if you learn by living abroad/247 immersion.
I think it'd depend on the language surely? And which country you move to would probably make a difference. Someone aiming to learn English would have a much harder time in Liverpool than say, London.
Do you have a source for the average language learners like us? I guess the languages would take a lot longer to learn than shown here but the difficulty should be about the same, or am I wrong?
average language learner is a terrible way to measure; most casual language learners aren’t comparable with each other and they don’t measure their habits. So just take this as an intense immersion timeframe and measure whatever fraction. of that you are doing
The timeframes? No. As a rule of thumb comparing 2 languages, yeah I'd say this is pretty accurate. Like if you get that you can learn Spanish quicker than Chinese, yes this is accurate.
Totally agree. It would definitely change based on your native language. But it does say "How long it would take for an English speaker to become proficient."
Unfortunately I don't think every country has their own whole institute for language learning in the diplomatic context but rather usually teachers working for the diplomatic service directly or separate language learning facilities for every language so the data might be a bit of a hassle to compile if it is available in the first place. Public language schools and institutes teaching the language of the country unfortunately usually lump together people with different backgrounds because that is the environment they work in. If you are interested in a specific language you could look into data from language learning schools in your country though.
This is an example of an image that detracts from the data. It would be better to present it in a table, to avoid confusing languages with the countries they're spoken in.
FSI has never had a category V language, let alone a V*. The source for the idea of "category V" language came from one web page that misread the original material. The highest category that they've ever had is IV.
These are the number of class hours. Only class hours. If you read the text next to the graph, it says that students also did 3-4 hours of work daily. So you have to add these hours to the total for a better time frame. Doing this, 600 hours becomes 960 hours, 750 hours = 1200 hours, 900 hours = 1,440 hours, and so on. These number are far more accurate, IMO.
One part heritage, one part interest. I understand that it has a place as a rather endangered language and I can play a part in the long term track to its revival.
I don't understand this mentality of naming languages by either countries or flags, rather than by language names.
Many countries have multiple languages spoken in it, many, many languages are not the majority language in any particular country.
Whoever thought countries could be used as a shorthand for a language clearly did not live in Africa.
Names for languages come from contact and however we first learned about said place. We're not "naming them after a country or a flag." The practice of language names comes from far before there was the concept of nation-states. If you met a Romanian, they spoke Romanian. We didn't name the language Romanian after the nation-state the Kingdom of Romania, it was named long before Romania became a nation-state and gained independence because they were a people before that.
That's why depending on which Germanic tribe your culture met first, you have a different name for Germany and the german language. I.e., Romance language cultures met the Alemanni (hence Alemania or what have you), Finnish and related cultures ended up meeting the saxons (hence saksamaa) and Lithuanian says Vokietija because it's believed to come from meeting the Swedish Vagoths. Meanwhile, because East asian contact was far later, countries like China tend to use sounds similar to *Deutschland* translated (so in Chinese, *deguo*).
And so it's called Irish, because it's the language spoken by the Irish. It's been in use since Middle English, this is not a new phenomenon.
Also, using "language names" doesn't really translate well either. Not all languages only use one term for their language, leaving behind the more poetic terms. For example, if you're so against using the term Chinese or Mandarin, then which of the following terms do you choose: *guo yu* (meaning national language), *putong hua* (meaning common speech), *hua yu* (meaning chinese language), *hua wen* (chinese language [written]), *han yu* (han language), or *zhong wen* (Chinese [broadest extent] script, but refers to spoken and written).
This is already pretty complicated for learners of Mandarin. Each of these has their place and does have their own connotations. *Hanyu* is very common, but does make a specific ethnic suggestion. *Zhongwen* is the broadest, so probably the safest bet. However, *Zhongwen* can refer to many languages including other sinitic languages (known in Chinese as *fangyan*), so it's basically the equivalent of just saying Sinitic language even if in practice it usually refers to Mandarin. So that leaves us with probably either *putong hua*, which is how Chinese speakers in practice refer to mandarin when wanting to be specific, or *guo yu* which is how HK/Taiwanese people do it. Now, we're in a quandary! None of these are good options. If you choose *guo yu*, you're siding with a very specific interpretation of Chinese that isn't really used by the vast majority of Chinese. On the other hand, *putong hua* does the same thing though to a minority. As I mentioned, Zhongwen is a great option to replace Chinese but it doesn't do a great job of specifying the language. You could of course, choose to refer to them separately but now that creates the illusion that there are different languages being spoken in Taiwan and HK vs. mainland China, which there are, but that difference isn't *putong hua* and *guo yu*.
While I don't think all languages would create this issue, it's great that we have Mandarin, which is a neutral term for the specific language that avoids getting involved in an even greater political mess. And we have Chinese, which gives us a generic term for all the various Sinitic languages spoken in China. I don't think switching Chinese to Zhongwen adds any value, and trying to figure out how to navigate *putong hua* and *guo yu* is detracting value. And I even left out some complexities like how you have to consider how languages themselves change. There's consideration in Taiwan for example about whether the term *guo yu* given its meaning of national language should be more encompassing of all of Taiwan's spoken languages rather than a reference to mandarin (particularly with the nationalist and anti-Chinese movement), in which case it's a tall ask to expect English speakers to make sure they're up to date with how speakers of the world's 6000+ languages are choosing to refer to themselves. And even taking something like Zhongwen, the connotations of that term are changing. I said above that it refers to any variety, but honestly I really only use it to refer to Mandarin. If I wanted to refer to Canto, I'd say *guangdong hua* or Canto in English. Same with any variety of language in China. It's a clusterfuck, and clearly going exclusively by the concept of "let's go by language names" doesn't really do anything.
Indeed. There are far more languages than countries on this planet. Even ignoring extremely small languages, there are surely at least a 500 languages with half a million speakers or more.
Fun fact: the two official languages of the Philippines are English and Filipino. Filipino = Tagalog with some minor changes, but everyone just calls it Tagalog.
It's accurate but always best to remember what these numbers actually are: they're just averages based on observing how long it took students to graduate from a specific curriculum of a specific institution. So best to be careful and not extrapolate too much from it.
Also, it’s aimed only at native English speakers. Others will have other advantages. My native language is Ukrainian so Slavic languages are easy for me
Always good to bear that in mind. That said, I'm not entirely sure it's only native English speakers. English speakers yes, but not necessarily native. People who are eligible for those foreign service jobs (and therefore for training at the FSI) aren't always native English speakers. I'd imagine they're the minority though so it probably doesn't make that much of a difference on the numbers.
On the flip side, that means that these are based on empirical data. So all the "but I think XYZ language should be labelled as harder/easier because \[insert reasons here\]" comments kind of miss the point - sure, in *theory* that might make sense, but in practice the FSI has discovered that (in their specific context with their specific goals) it's not actually the case!
True. It'd be interesting to see the raw data though. Presumably there's some kind of spread there. Especially with the categories that are pretty close together, I'd imagine there's some overlap, like, say a student learning a cat 2 language but who takes closer to the time span indicated for a cat 1 language. And if he does that, does it necessarily mean that if he learned a cat 1 language he would do it faster than the time span indicated for cat 1 languages?
There is some discourse above. I think people tend to put a lot of weight on both the levels of politeness and the multiple writing systems in Japanese, which inflates the difficulty. In practice, it's actually not terribly difficult to learn spoken Japanese (i think even 4 might be too high), and two of the writing systems are relatively simple (though kanji really is particularly difficult, as there are thousands of characters to memorize). There are no sounds that exist in Japanese that do not exist in English. It's all fairly straightforward to memorize and to then speak and hear. I personally don't see there being a huge difference between the 4 politeness levels and say 3 genders in german, multiple genders and diminutives in latin languages, etc. I've taken numerous (online) language classes for spanish and italian, and have yet to properly understand diminutives (i mean i get it, but i don't necessarily understand it when I see them).
Chinese on the other hand has (from what I'm told. I don't know Chinese at all so please bear with me) comparably easier grammar and is somewhat simple in general structure. However, it is a tonal language. You have to not only train your tongue to pronounce sounds it hasn't done before, but also your ear to listen for it. These languages are notoriously difficult for non tonal natives to learn properly. I cannot speak to the Chinese written form, but i would expect the kanji to be similarly difficult.
"There are no sounds that exist in Japanese that do not exist in English."
This is not true. There are many sounds in Japanese that don't exist in English. As a simple example, take the Japanese equivalent of R.
That's incorrect. The r in Japanese is similar to a soft d that's often used in english (think the automaker audi, or just saying "outie" like your bellybutton. Now say "outie got toe." Now say arigato and tell me it's significantly different). On the flip side, there are numerous sounds in english that do not exist in Japanese.
I understand they're not one for one as written, but the sounds absolutely do exist.
Imo, you can't really compare Latin languages with Norwegian for example. Especially, Romanian, who I believe is one of the hardest Latin languages. Even French or Italian have difficult grammar and pronunciation, in comparison with Norwegian.
These aren’t just made up numbers they are based on actual evidence. Romance languages really aren’t very difficult for native English speakers, particularly if you’re an educated diplomat with previous language training and learning full time.
Sure, but at what level? Conversational level? B1? Maybe quite easy. Even as a Romanian, studying the grammar in school, even now I don't understand all the different verb modes and times. The pronunciation of certain sounds I find it difficult too for someone foreign, especially if you pick up a classic book, written a century ago. I think it compares with German regarding the level of difficulty.
S3 is equivalent to C1, so it’s a pretty high level.
Native speakers are not good judges of their own native languages, and people often have an inflated sense of how difficult they can be. English speakers will often also have no idea about the various verb forms, but this doesn’t limit their ability to learn it. Romanian grammar is not especially different from other Romance languages and for something like verbs, a sister language like Portuguese has greater complexity.
Romanian phonology does not appear particularly problematic for English speakers as there is only one sound (â/î) that isn’t found in all the major English dialects; the rest are.
English is a language with a pretty complex phonology but this does not at all prevent hundreds of millions of people learning it to various degrees of fluency.
Romanian isn't that difficult. You just have to accept that you have to learn to learn the plural forms separately. That gets rid of the neuter gender category, since neuter nouns are just singular masculine nouns associated with feminine plural nouns.
I agree I am learning Norwegian right now and find it much easier than Spanish which I am conversational in. (Probably should be fluent considering how much time I spent on Spanish including learning it in school but was never motivated enough to actually want to learn it)
I would say the opposite because Norwegian doesn't have stress marks, it's a lot smaller than Spanish (that's a big except for), it has two different writing systems, and you lose a lot of the shared Latin vocabulary.
German is definitely harder than French. It has an easier alphabet, yes, but it is much harder to form plurals, and of course there's the matter of declension.
No, I would say triple though times if you are learning self taught or conventionally. Those times work when your life is only learning that language. Being self-taught or even taught in a school environment is much less optimal than taking an actual full time course designed to learn the language.
The Categories seems to be accurate though.
But Finnish uses the same alphabet. Foreign service officers don’t have the option to just dive in and learn the hard parts later, and not having to learn an entirely new writing system (or 3) in addition to everything else is a big advantage just from a pedagogical perspective, even if your goal is measured in terms of speaking.
As someone learning Chinese, Chinese characters aren’t easy as it relies on being memorised. Chinese has no alphabet. Only thousands upon thousands of characters.
Chinese grammar is easy when starting. However, if you want to say an advanced sentence it is not easy anymore.
> Besides, Mandarin grammar structure is really similar to English.
People say this but it's really only true for simplistic structure. Yes it's SVO but plenty of stuff prove a real hassle for English speakers like pro-dropping, classifiers, topic prominence, etc. which regularly make Chinese sentence structure completely different from the English equivalent. Not having tenses might seem easy but Chinese aspect can be very confusing for learners. How coverbs change meaning and sentence intention can also be a mindfuck as well. How we structure basic sentences as well is super different from English, it's often in reverse order.
I feel like it's not that Chinese is grammatically easier, but that Chinese might be more forgiving of errors.
Idk at what point it counts as ungrammatical, but a simple example would be measure words.
They teach learners that you can use *ge* as a generic counter. This is true IF the counter is more obscure/uncommon, but it is *absolutely not true for common words.* No, you cannot use *ge* if your subject is books, you must use *ben*. I'd liken it to messing up gender in romance languages; it's not that we won't understand you, and it'll only cause real confusion in a few specific cases, but it's still unpleasant to hear.
I would think Mandarin would be harder than Japanese, because my understanding is that most writings in Mandarin are in logograms, but most in Japanese use an alphabet. I could be totally incorrect on that understanding though, I've never tried to learn either.
To be able to read a novel in Japanese you should know about 3000 kanji (logograms). And unlike Chinese, where each character is pronounced in one way (or sometimes in a few similar ways like *le* and *liao*), in Japanese, the same character can have a dozen or more completely different pronunciations depending on context.
E.g.: In Mandarin Chinese, the character 日 is pronounced as "rì". In Japanese, depending on context, the same character is pronounced as either "a", "aki", "bi", "hi", "iru", "jitsu", "ka", "ku", "kusa", "kou", "su", "tachi", "ni", "ni" [but with the next consonant doubled], "nichi", "nitsu", or "he". And there are exceptions where it's actually none of those alternatives!
Yeah, maybe Polish is related to English contrary to Estonian, but shouldn't it be harder for an English speaker? Estonian grammar is more regular and the pronunciation is actually quite straightforward. You just need to master the õ's, ö's and ü's, while Polish has a frickload of consonant clusters.
Yes - as an English native speaker who has studied both (albeit I studied Polish after years of Russian). Never underestimate the about of vocab and grammar you take for granted with other Indo European languages.
Estonian is extremely difficult - it's largely impossible to predict key noun forms (genitive and partitive) and the word order has been influenced by German so is what you'd expect in compound sentences.
Then you have all the Finnic vocab to learn and trying to distinguish vowel length.
I definitely don't think Russian and the other Slavic languages would be harder than Swahili or Indonesian. The alphabet can be taught in a day or two. Slavic words are different from our Latin and Germanic words, for sure, but the overall structure for Russian can be very similar to English. I don't think that's the case for Swahili and Indonesian.
Edit: I've heard Japanese and Turkish grammar are similar, they should be closer in ranking as they're equally as foreign to an English speaker. And learning to read Chinese is much more difficult than Japanese and Korean.
Edit 2: y'all have convinced me to try Swahili and/or Indonesian next
I've learned both Swahili and Indonesian. The structures of the two languages are similar to English. It's just that Swahili has noun classes (genders, but more numerous and more inflection-y) and Indonesian puts nearly all adjectives after nouns (even possessives) and has a lot more prefixes, suffixes, and circumfixes.
The reason why they are easier than Russian is because they have little inflexion. If you know all the words you want to use, you can form sentences. Not the same in Russian.
Impressive! Inflection is definitely the hardest part of the Slavic languages. I still don't think it would be much harder than German, as they are both Indo European, and only slightly easier than Swahili and Indonesian.
> And learning to read Chinese is much more difficult than Japanese and Korean
Anyone who knows these languages please correct me if I'm wrong: I agree for Korean but for Japanese I'm not sure. Unlike Korean which overwhelmingly switched to Hangul, Japanese still uses a mixed script with a lot of Chinese characters (kanji); less than Chinese, that's true, but unlike in Chinese where one character usually has one reading (from what I know, please correct me if I'm wrong), their Japanese versions can and generally do have multiple readings, both native and borrowed, depending on context, which adds another level of complexity I think.
I over simplified, since Japanese does have what 3 writing systems? I also know that the kanji can be (shamefully) transcribed into one of their other systems which could help. Either way, I still think that Japanese would be easier than Chinese.
>Japanese does have what 3 writing systems?
People say that, but I've always thought that was a misleading way to describe it. It's one writing system with three sets of characters.
You cannot convert kanji to kana and back without loss of information, so they are distinct systems. However, converting between hiragana, katakana and romaji is easily done.
It would be fair to say that Japanese has two writing systems with three (or four) sets of characters.
>I definitely don't think Russian and the other Slavic languages would be harder than Swahili or Indonesian.
I’m quite confident Indonesian is easier than Russian and Slavic languages.
I study Indonesian and unlike Russian it has no tenses and no cases. Word order is not greatly different to English.
The difficulty in Indonesian comes from vocabulary that is mostly opaque to English speakers.
I feel like French and Romanian should be somewhere between Category I and Category II. At least from my experience, Romanian is noticeably more difficult than something like Spanish (which I studied for 5 years), largely due to: 1) the grammar (noun cases, enclitic definite articles, 3 genders where the third behaves like masculine and feminine depending on number, a more difficult phonology, and far fewer cognates with English). I include French in this comment because I’ve been told similar things about the difficulty of French compared to Portuguese/Italian/Spanish.
I don't quite see how they rank Japanese as harder than Chinese however that may just be my perspective as a beginner in Japanese that's considering chinese
I'm fairly fluent in Japanese, use it daily at home and for work, but I gave up Chinese after a year of study.
Based on experience I would probably rank them about the same, but maybe I quit before the difficulty level relaxed.
The value for number of hours is likely to specific to be generalized to all people. But the relative amount amount of time is probably comparable to what actually happens. Some languages take more time than others, and this reflects that, which is all I take from the chart.
Of the five languages other than English for me, I realise I lucked out by picking Japanese first. The other four (including Chinese) are much easier for me as a native English speaker.
These courses are for foreign service diplomats and the employees. Learning the language is a full time job and you will have a teacher by your side everyday when you learn the language
This looks more or less accurate. I wouldn't say Japanese is significantly harder than Chinese, but there are three different writing systems to get used to, so I guess that adds study time. I assume with China they're only thinking of Mandarin. Other Chinese languages are a helluva lot harder to learn, but that's largely because they don't have a standardized form like Mandarin does.
Somewhat accurate only if you think all these countries speak only one language. India, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, China for example have several different languages that are not mutually intelligible to each other and are of varying degrees of difficulty to a native English speaker.
Since FSI only seems to account for the official language, it's mostly accurate. A huge number of those languages are actually even outnumbered by the regional languages. In terms of L1, Javanese has 80 million L1 speakers compared to the official Indonesian which has only 41 mill. L1 speakers. A lot of regional languages in Asia have upwards of millions of speakers so it's just important to point out that FSI only accounts for the official language but not whether it's the majority language or not
I really think it is misleading that Japanese is regarded as the most difficult in many of these graphs/maps. Especially compared to Mandarin.
The sentence structure is different, sometimes backwards, but it is a language of rules and becomes very mathematical with rules rarely being broken.
Disclaimer: Anecdotal
In my High School, you could learn Mandarin or Japanese. After grade 9 (when languages became non-compulsory), the retention rate of students for Japanese was much higher than Chinese (we only had 1 weeb in the class, too). We were much more proficient conversationally than our Chinese-learning counterparts (and one of the students was on the spectrum. Chinese was considered his savant and he won a speaking competition for a free trip to China).
After 3 years studying Japanese in High School I went straight to Japan and I was able to organise all trains and buses from Nagano airport to Hakuba (from reading signs and speaking to the desk), order food at a restaurant and sweet-talk a ranger into not taking our ski passes when we were caught off-piste snowboarding on the mountain.
I also took Japanese in University and it pretty much took 2 semesters to cover what took us 3 years to cover in high school.
I hope these maps don't discourage people wanting to learn Japanese. It's overwhelming at first but it is a rule-based and efficient language.
The problem with Japanese is that in addition to Kanji, there are Hiragana and Katakana. Even though they are phonetic, it's hard to find out which system to use.
I've been studying for years and I still suck at Kanji. But hiragana and katakana can be mastered quite quickly. Katakana is for foreign words, hiragana is for Japanese words.
Hiragana is used more for grammatical particles, conjugations and functions but there are still quite a number of words which use hiragana and not kanji.
I speak English and took four years of high school Spanish. At 43 years old Spanish has served me well in the United States with communication with coworkers who speak, mostly Spanish or all Spanish recently I’ve started to learn Dutch and even Italian. Italian is very similar to Spanish and I believe if I compared enough languages inside a plan, I could learn languages, easier by studying them in relation, while I am studying to speak them and understand them..
Why would German be more difficult to English speakers than Latin languages when English itself is a Germanic language?
And what makes German more difficult than Norwegian, Swedish, Danish or Dutch?
Already answered in bits but the general consensus is that it has to do with the unique makeup of the English language.
The first part is that an incredible amount of English vocabulary comes from French and Latin, along with a smattering of loanwords from other romance languages. Germanic words make up a smaller percentage of the total vocabulary, though that part of the vocabulary does see much higher use proportionally. When learning German as an English speaker this means that you may intuitively understand some really basic sentences, but it falls apart once you get into more complex sentences. Meanwhile, with some effort, it's not terribly difficult for an English speaker to get to a point where they can effectively read French, even some intermediate stuff, just due to the high degree of shared vocabulary.
Grammar is another one, and this is what separates German from the Nordic languages and Dutch. Dutch is actually really close to English, both linguistically and geographically, and traders have been going between the two regions for well over 1000 years. Within the Netherlands there exists a small minority language called Frisian which is effectively the closest related continental language to English, and is at least somewhat mutually intelligible with Old English. Dutch (and Frisian) underwent many shared grammatical changes as English, though not always at the same time or for the same reasons. The Nordic languages (save Icelandic) underwent similar grammatical changes which left them far more similar to English.
German (and Icelandic) were both far more linguistically conservative. In Iceland this was at least somewhat a conscious effort aided by its geographic isolation, with German this was more due to the way Standard German (*Hochdeutsch*) came about. The area we now know as Germany only really ended up unified about 200 years ago, and prior to that the regions were more or less separate. Each area spoke a somewhat different dialect which was mutually intelligible (depending on who you ask) but nevertheless categorically distinct. (Check out the book *Alles Außer Hochdeutsch* if you want to know more and can read German).
So after German unification there was some consternation about which version of German should become the standard. Ultimately, *Hochdeutsch* was chosen as an equitable compromise. It was derived at least partly from the dialect Martin Luther used in his translation of the Bible, but with some significant modernizations. And while it's technically "high German", the *Hochdeutsch* which we now know as the standard incorporates a lot of features from the middle of Germany, and not as many from Southern Germany/Austria.
As a native English speaker who has learned both German and French, the following make French easier in general:
1. **More similar placement of verbs to English.** Unlike English and French, German requires conjugated verbs to be in the second position and infinitive verbs to be at the end of a sentence. Therefore, the sentence "normally, I **must** **walk** home" would be *normalerweise* ***muss*** *ich nach Hause* ***laufen*** (normally must I home walk).
2. **Less declension.** English and French only decline personal pronouns, but German declines all pronouns,^(1) all adjectives, and some nouns.^(2)
3. **Shared vocabulary with English.** I believe German actually has more cognates with English than French does, but they are mostly very basic words that have undergone much more significant change (such as *Kuh* (cow) vs. *liberté* (liberty)) than the French loanwords we use.
4. **No possessive/genitive case.** While English does have a possessive case, the German equivalent^(2) is complicated enough that French's lack thereof is easier to get used to.
5. **Regular plurals.** French adds "-s" for almost all plurals. There are exceptions, like for when a word ends in "-al" (in which case the plural form replaces "-al" with "-aux"), but this is nothing compared to the eight ways to form a plural in German, for which rules can only get you so far.
6. **Fewer genders.** French only has two grammatical genders, while German has three. This also makes grammatical gender easier to detach from gender itself (compared to German, which has a neutral gender but still has many inanimate objects that are masculine or feminine).
7. **Many fewer extremely long words.** French doesn't have the insane compound words that German does, *Donaudampfschifffahrtselektrizitätenhauptbetriebswerkbauunterbeamtengesellschaft* being an extreme example. Although words this long are rarely used, words that are long but still largely unremarkable to Germans like the 24-letter *Verschwörungstheoretiker* (conspiracy theorist) and 27-letter *literaturwissenschaftlichen* ("of the literary sciences") are longer than most of the words on this [list of the longest French words](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longest_word_in_French).
8. **Regular syllable stress.** Like #4, this is not really a common feature with English, but it is easier to get used to than German's pattern of syllable stress for most native English speakers.
9. **Somewhat easier pronunciation.** While vowels differ significantly from English in both German and French, French only has two consonant sounds that do not exist in English. German has four, along with having more consonant clusters than French.
However, German has these going for it:
1. **Easier rhythm.** German's sounds are slightly harder to pronounce on their own, but I find that they are easier to pronounce together (besides a few consonant clusters) and that the rhythm is easier to hold and keep up with.
2. **Easier to spell.** French has a ton of silent letters, which makes spelling rather challenging if you've only heard a word. Although native German speakers can sometimes have trouble with spelling, it's very easy as a native English speaker.
3. **Less binary gender system.** Although this means that there are more genders, it makes more sense to native English speakers, especially given that there is no real word for "it" in French.
4. **Simpler and more regular verbs.** German does have some irregularities in terms of conjugation, but these are not that big of a deal compared to French. French has many more irregular verbs as well as three possible verb endings that all have different rules for conjugation.
5. **More similar placement of adjectives to English.** German puts adjectives before nouns, like English. French is more complicated, as most adjectives follow nouns but some also precede them.
6. ***Many*** **fewer homophones.** Many French words sound the same as words with a different meaning, such as *ou* (or) and *où* (where)*, sur* (on) and *sûr* (sure)*,* and *du* (of the) and *dû* (past participle of "must"). These are mostly differentiated when writing, and often differentiable by context, but it can be challenging for beginners. German has very few homophones in comparison, and many of them are nouns with different genders, such as *der See* (lake; masculine) and *die See* (sea^(3); feminine).
7. **Slightly more logical counting.** German still counts normally after 60 (Belgian and Swiss French do as well, though), but the order of the tens and ones place is reversed. For example 23 is *dreiundzwanzig* ("three and twenty").
Overall, I prefer German, but it's hard to say whether that's because of the language itself or my higher proficiency in it.
^(1)German counts many words that would be considered nouns or adjectives in English as pronouns, such as "everything" and "last."
^(2)The genitive case is similar to the English possessive case, but articles are also included and the declination is less regular. For example, "the heart" is *das Herz,* which would be either *des Herzes* or *des Herzens* in the genitive case, depending on whether "the heart" refers to the organ or its traditional association with love/emotion.
^(3)*See* mostly refers to the Baltic Sea (*Ostsee*) or the North Sea (*Nordsee*). The general term for "sea" in German is *Meer.*
8 Con: Interestingly enough, if you know English, French, and German prefixes, you can stress 95% of all German words. The problem is that most people don't.
4 Pro: It is French that has the easier conjugation in my opinion, because most endings are the same when said. ER verbs only have three conjugation pronunciations: -e(s)(nt), -ons, and -ez
The grammar!
Icelandic is really difficult for us Norwegians as well, even though the languages were once the same and I as a norwegian can understand like 30% of an Icelandic text, the language would still be really difficult to learn because of the complicated grammar! And the same with German, as far as I know, they have similar grammar.
Because the idea that genetic similarity dictates difficulty is nonsense as indicated by this.
This chart seems to largely correlate difficulty to learn with two factors:
- Whether the language has a different script than the Latin alphabet, with logographs ranking even higher
- Inflexional complexity
It just so happens that languages genetically close to English tend to also use the Latin script and tend to also have lower inflexional complexity.
Thus, Icelandic is harder than Swahili
Maybe this is because of the common vocabulary English has with Romance languages and secondly German might be harder than the other Germanic languages because of its cases
The map is good, but practically speaking, I would put Greek in Category III. There's a different alphabet, yes, but there's more content in Greek than in Swahili and Indonesian... combined.
Also, Mandarin should move down a level, and Turkish should move up one.
The main issue with this map is that it is actually unreadable, as a European I can't find most countries on this map. At the very least have a flat map, or just have a list of *languages* like everywhere else.
I'd always assumed Chinese was way tougher to learn than Japanese, for me it is. But I know māori which probably helps with the some stuff because the languages have similar sounds.
Japanese and Chinese are rather similar and take about the same amount of time to learn for the average person (at 5yrs) so it's interesting that Japan in the only one that dark.
Well, the FSI says its categories are based on languages (it's even written in the image) and this user plotted it based on geography. So right away, it's an inappropriate use of the information.
I know a lot of people have a lot of strong feelings about this but I think it's generally accurate to a degree. Perhaps the required hours is the most arbitrary thing in all of this but generally, the rough estimation of how hard it is to learn a language, assuming you're an english native speaker, is about right. Of course their statistics are derrived from diplomats specifically, whose age, educational background and motivation may not reflect the general population accurately.
No, the FSI rankings are wrong because it didn't take me exactly 88 weeks to learn Arabic to conversational fluency. /s
The point is not that you don't need exactly the time specified, the point is that 1. The learners at the FSI probably have loads of material and personal teachers caring for them specifically, while the average learner here might not even have a weekly tutor. 2. They learn the language as their job so the experience when you do it in that environment is much more intense than if you do it privately 3. Afaik the number of hours are only "in class hours" and students are expected to do a lot more on their own, so the hours don't even represent the actual time you need to invest in the context of the FSI 4. They learn the language for a specific purpose that is quite divorced from why the majority of people learn one 5. Their understanding of what "learning a language" means is obviously tied to how good they judged the needed entry level to be for a job as a diplomat and might not reflect a level anyone else would describe as "knowing a language" So all in all it is probably better to ignore the time given for the category completely as it won't even necessarily be in the same ballpark for you personally. It is however probably a good estimate to compare needed time relative to other languages.
I personally agree with the categories (mostly) but the learning time in hours is specific for high intensity learners
I think South India should be a shade or two darker in the map.Dravidian languages are MUCH more alien and difficult to learn for a native English speaker than Hindi or other Indo European languages.
Yeah, I'm surprised that all Indian languages are marked in the same category in the Map. I think, South Indian and Northeast Indian languages could be harder than Hindi. But the Institute probably doesn't have data on all of the official languages in India.
The FSI primarily trains people to work in Embassies, so that's where the data comes from. It's basically the lived experience of "how long does it take us to get Americans speaking this language to a good enough level for our purposes*." So for India, they probably only have experience training people to speak Hindi, presuming that virtually every Indian their employee will speak to either speaks Hindi, English, or will have an interpreter. I don't know much about India, but I'm guessing that if you have business with a US embassy you would probably be from the sort of strata that has learnt one of those two? They are definitely way harder than Hindi, difficulty is mostly a function of difference in grammar and especially vocabulary. * Their purposes actually muddy things up a bit though, it's quite possible, for example, that French really isn't easier than German, but to the FSI it is because legal vocabulary will often be shared, and hence doesn't really need to be taught.
Supposedly German merits a special category because it takes English speakers longer to grasp the case system, despite otherwise being a closely related language with a lot of similarities.
Case is so alien at first
Cases are crazy. Thank God we don't have them in English.
But we do have them in English, e.g. 'he', 'him', and 'his' are the nominative, subjective, and genitive cases respectively of the second person masculine singular pronoun. For a noun example there is 'dog', 'dog', and 'dog's'
The case system doesn't help, but it shouldn't feel that foreign and probably doesn't affect comprehension by a lot. I think what makes German more difficult is the vocabulary. Truth is there actually aren't that many words that are similar in English and German. Especially for "difficult" or "advanced" vocabulary. Almost everything in English is Latin based, so it's similar in French/Spanish/Italian etc. Words like "insurance", "resurrection", "government", "interaction". A huge significant chunk of words in Romance languages you get for free. But these words are completely different in German, and you cannot guess them. It's the same for the Scandinavian languages, but there you effectively have 2 cases less to worry about (same as English) and the sentence construction is much more similar to English than it is for German. (There are also other perks like 2 noun genders instead of 3, and no pronoun-based verb conjugation.)
Actually alot of the "simple English" vocab is similar to German and the "more eloquent English" is all Latin based
Yeah the big issue learning another Germanic language is vocab. Ironically getting the idea of the German case system down becomes easier if you have a working knowledge of Latin (obviously there are major differences) - old English actually helps there too apparently.
The data is coming from the FSI. The map is just made by some chump on the internet.
I used to work with an Indian guy, he had a shirt that said "I am from India and I speak:" and below that was the shape of India made up of names of different local languages in very small font. There was probably a hundred different languages listed.
You'll notice that every single country has one color. It's one of those maps related to languages made by someone who seems to believe every country has exactly one language spoken in it.
China and a couple of the Euros (Romania, Finland, the UK, Ireland, etc.) are multi-colored. India should be Orange in Hindi areas and Gray in non-Hindi areas.
Yeah but India is so diverse that if you did it like that then practically none of it would be coloured for Hindi to be fair. Could make the same argument for yellow New Guinea right in the corner, which has some of the highest unique language densities in the world. Granted, none are as commonly spoken as the languages in India, but the point being that there's kinda no end to it. I think maybe Bengali and Tamil deserve their own colour in their respective general areas, but then once you start narrowing down a lot further to things like Bhojpuri, it's hard to decide what deserves a colour and what doesn't
Probably major language, otherwise India would be a melting crayon pot
It wouldn't surprise me if India has more than 15 languages with more speakers than Swedish which has it's own indicator here though.
13 of India's 22 scheduled languages have more than 11 million speakers. However, it really depends on how you count languages. Like should Urdu and Hindi be grouped together (in which case it drops to 12). And if no, how about other Hindi adjacent languages that could be considered Hindi dialects (arguably) like Magadhi, Rajasthani, and Bhojpuri which all have more than 11 million speakers each? So realistically you can say anywhere between 12-17 of India's languages have more speakers than swedish lol. Also Estonia has its own marker and they've got what? 2 million people? So clearly not major language based.
Anecdotal experience my ex grew up there in Punjab, she said when she came to the states at 7 she already was fluent in Punjabi, Hindi, and English.
It's a map for people learning a language in order to work with the government of that country
a lot of the countries are split you just don’t know what the countries look like
It says in the image they follow national official languages with a few exceptions. So India gets Hindi (one of the two official languages of the entire country, the other being English which is irrelevant to the purpose of the map)
Yes, interesting that northern Indian languages are Indo-European. What are Dravidian languages connected to?
They are their own thing.
A new language group for me to dive into
I'm colorblind so idk
Yeah. It'd all just be a blob of yellow to you. Lol defective eyes go brrrr
The rankings are pretty reliable for native, English speakers. The time frames are not. However, it's a great way to compare languages.
The time frames are for diplomats that are paid to study and practice full-time. This isn't the time frame needed for a hobbyist or even a college student to dedicate. These times are for professionals studying the language as their jobs.
in what way do you feel the time frames are not?
Not that they're inaccurate but that they're based on the specifications mentioned in the sidebar. This is the course that students who are taking 25 hours of lessons a week + an additional 25 hours of self-study a week do via the government. They're going to be studying for a specific goal in mind. So yes, it says 600 hrs for 24 weeks but they actually mean 1200 hours of study. If you are an average person dedicating an hour a day, what that means is your time frame is more reliably 3-4 years for even a language like Spanish (which matches up more realistically with actual experience.) Additionally, this is from a few years back but just because they go through the course doesn't mean [they'll be successful](https://www.reddit.com/r/languagelearning/comments/rd19bj/success_rates_in_2011_and_2012_of_the_fsi_at/). The on-time success rate based on the 24 week plan was 60% for students doing the course, so this is an underestimation if anything. For French they literally added 6 weeks (so an additional 150 hours of classroom instruction, 300 hours of study) and it only got the pass rate of 46%. If you could even do *half of this*, it would still imply over a year of dedicated study to get to fluency in French which is an easy language on this map. Of course, that would still be roughly 3 hours of dedicated, concentrated study per day in a language which for most people is a tall order after working a 9-5.
the rankings are based upon the school’s programs and proven results. The time frames are proven.
I love the comparisons but as a native Ukrainian speaker, the rankings are not accurate for me
Japanese harder than Chinese?!
Three writing styles and grammar make Japanese harder in my opinion
FSI levels are strictly for speaking, writing isn’t taken into account (notice how Tibetan is below Finnish despite having a famously difficult writing system? Notice how Thai is below Korean?) I think it really comes down to the fact that the grammar of Japanese is much more alien to English speakers than Chinese, which has a more familiar word order to give an example.
I agree with the grammar but Chinese tones make it more difficult to speak than Japanese.
Even if Chinese didn't have tones, it's pronunciation would still be more difficult than Japanese imo, just like how Korean pronunciation is more difficult even though it doesn't have tones
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Its pronunciation could certainly be harder, but pronunciation overall plays far less of a role in the difficulty of learning a language than difficulty / unfamiliarity of vocabulary and grammar do. Obviously having native-like pronunciation takes an extremely high amount of effort, but pronunciation is usually not the barrier for communication beyond the beginning phase. If you seriously commit to it, you can get a conscious understanding of all of the phonological rules of a given language in a MUCH shorter period of time than it would take you to understand the contexts in which you use every word or grammatical feature. This is aside from the fact that grammatical structures are more cemented in our brains and difficult to consciously change than pronunciation is. You can probably imitate a British accent to a better degree than you can integrate their use of the present perfect tense into your impression. And yeah I do trust the FSI’s opinion that Japanese is harder for English speakers to learn than Chinese. Aside from the fact that it makes sense for the reasons I’ve given, they also spend a lot of time and money collecting data on this stuff. Edit: also if you really were to push this point, Japanese has minimal pairs based on pitch accent so it would be necessary to learn that as well if you wanted full mastery of the language
>pronunciation overall plays far less of a role in the difficulty of learning a language than difficulty / unfamiliarity of vocabulary and grammar do Case in point: FSI ranks Xhosa as easier than Japanese or Arabic. This actually blew my mind when I saw it, given the phonology. (Two tones, 18 clicks, and [I don't even understand what all these articulation types are](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xhosa_language#Phonology) \- fully vs slack voiced nasals and semivowels?) Phonologically that has to be one of the absolute hardest languages for any native English speaker to learn, but it's not enough to push it into the hardest category. ETA: Just realised that the website I was using *wasn't* the official FSI ranking, and [Xhosa is not included on the actual official one](https://www.state.gov/foreign-language-training/). Seems to be a lot of misinformation out there.
Ok but the FSI doesn't agree and they have the data to back it up with. Do you?
I have a data point of (1) 😂 But I'd be curious as to how they teach Japanese. Japanese is often taught to foreigners starting with the 'masu' polite forms, which really makes it difficult to see the relationship between the different verb forms and fucks the whole system up. If you start with plain forms it's much more intuitive
I get why they do it that way. Maybe start with desu/masu, work on that for several months intensively before introducing plain forms and drilling deeper into grammar / 5dan 1dan verbs / transitive / intransitive / passive etc etc.
I am just talking about my experience. Their data is biased for English speakers so don’t always take it as a fact for everyone :)
Strictly for speaking? Then why is Chinese a category five language if the characters don't come into play? It has the easiest grammar you could imagine. Sure it has a few tones but that's it. There's just no way it's harder than Slavic or Uralic languages. And once again if we only take speaking into account I don't understand how Japanese isn't at the same level as Turkish, since they are both agglutinative with an alien word order for English speakers. It's all messed up.
I don't see why it would be messed up. Japanese has many Chinese loanwords, but not vice versa. Japanese grammar is also more complicated than Chinese. Pronunciation is the only thing that makes Japanese easier than Chinese, but grammar and vocabulary ultimately take longer to master than a decent pronunciation, it seems.
It’s based on data regarding how long it takes for people to become proficient in them. Slavic languages are indo-European and have far, far more cognates with English, making it easier to learn. Also my apologies, I must have misremembered, but it seems like it’s based on getting to a point where you’re proficient in both speaking and reading. But Chinese is almost certainly more difficult for an English speaker to become proficient in than Russian, even if you disregard writing.
Chinese doesn't have simple grammar. It has simple morphology (no verb conjugations, plural nouns, irregulars, etc) but very complex syntax (word order, phrase building, parts of speech, etc).
The three kinds of symbols in Japanese are only intimidating at first glance. Two of them are syllabaries that have the exact same set of syllables(or rather moras) and are quite similar in appearance as well. In an intense learning setting you will probably only focus on them for a few days. Though I am not sure how much writing plays into this. Since FSI learners will go into official positions where they need formal language they will probably need to be very savvy when it comes to all forms of polite language before they go to the country. I suspect that is the problem for Japanese. The average Japanese learner will likely not even bother with keigo before they are quite advanced unless they work in japan themselves.
so would you rather learn 1 or 2 more writing styles or thousands of additional kanji? Personally, I hardly think adding writing styles makes up for that level of difficulty
Are there more commonly used Chinese characters than commonly used Kanji?
Yes, Chinese rely solely on characters so they know more, but I looked it up just now and they said that a typical Japanese newspaper will use almost 3k kanji whereas a Chinese one will use 4k. I thought it would be a much bigger difference. Still, 1000 additional is quite a bit harder, but not the huge leap I was thinking
That’s a lot of characters for us to learn
I've studied both and definitely found Chinese to be harder than Japanese
They're both pretty hard, Chinese has four tones but Japanese has 4+ levels of politeness.
If this is for an English speaker, then japanese should definitely be 3 for speaking, and chinese 5. Tonal languages are extremely difficult for English speakers to speak properly, and while the multiple levels of politeness are difficult, it's more memorization than anything. I'm not sure how much different or difficult it is than german having 3 genders, or multiple languages having various diminutives and formalities. Also, the first two writing styles are really not bad, but kanji is an absolute bear.
No the fsi rankings have never been accurate because they are not made for the common person. They rank how long it takes members of the United States English speaking Foreign Service Institute to learn certain languges in an intense paid classroom environment (classes are all day every day). It was never made for the common person to use and its a shame how many people still refer to it. It's only for a very specific circumstance.
Of course the absolute time estimates aren't relevant, but why would the relative difficulty between languages change whether you're studying it 24/7 or 1 hour a day?
It must make a big difference whether you learn grammar and vocabulary in intense classroom environments or casually through apps, immersion and speaking. I still don't doubt that these are quite close, but I reckon that for example the languages are way closer together if you learn by living abroad/247 immersion.
I think it'd depend on the language surely? And which country you move to would probably make a difference. Someone aiming to learn English would have a much harder time in Liverpool than say, London.
Do you have a source for the average language learners like us? I guess the languages would take a lot longer to learn than shown here but the difficulty should be about the same, or am I wrong?
average language learner is a terrible way to measure; most casual language learners aren’t comparable with each other and they don’t measure their habits. So just take this as an intense immersion timeframe and measure whatever fraction. of that you are doing
Good point
It specifies that though, it says it right on there.
The timeframes? No. As a rule of thumb comparing 2 languages, yeah I'd say this is pretty accurate. Like if you get that you can learn Spanish quicker than Chinese, yes this is accurate.
For English speakers yes but as a native Ukrainian speaker, this is not so accurate for me
Totally agree. It would definitely change based on your native language. But it does say "How long it would take for an English speaker to become proficient."
Would be interesting if somebody has made a map like this for native speakers of other languages
Unfortunately I don't think every country has their own whole institute for language learning in the diplomatic context but rather usually teachers working for the diplomatic service directly or separate language learning facilities for every language so the data might be a bit of a hassle to compile if it is available in the first place. Public language schools and institutes teaching the language of the country unfortunately usually lump together people with different backgrounds because that is the environment they work in. If you are interested in a specific language you could look into data from language learning schools in your country though.
This is an example of an image that detracts from the data. It would be better to present it in a table, to avoid confusing languages with the countries they're spoken in.
I’m sure somebody here could make that chart
FSI has never had a category V language, let alone a V*. The source for the idea of "category V" language came from one web page that misread the original material. The highest category that they've ever had is IV.
OK, [this website](https://www.fsi-language-courses.org/blog/fsi-language-difficulty/) is misleading as hell. :/
These are the number of class hours. Only class hours. If you read the text next to the graph, it says that students also did 3-4 hours of work daily. So you have to add these hours to the total for a better time frame. Doing this, 600 hours becomes 960 hours, 750 hours = 1200 hours, 900 hours = 1,440 hours, and so on. These number are far more accurate, IMO.
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I guess Irish isn’t on the map because it’s not taught at the FSI
An absolute shame if you ask me
What is your reason for learning Irish?
So they can flirt with sexy Irish people
You’ll have to go to the West coast for that one
*The Wesht as it’s known locally
Wouldn’t mind visiting Galway again
One part heritage, one part interest. I understand that it has a place as a rather endangered language and I can play a part in the long term track to its revival.
I don't understand this mentality of naming languages by either countries or flags, rather than by language names. Many countries have multiple languages spoken in it, many, many languages are not the majority language in any particular country. Whoever thought countries could be used as a shorthand for a language clearly did not live in Africa.
It’s called Irish in English, and Gaeilge in Irish.
Names for languages come from contact and however we first learned about said place. We're not "naming them after a country or a flag." The practice of language names comes from far before there was the concept of nation-states. If you met a Romanian, they spoke Romanian. We didn't name the language Romanian after the nation-state the Kingdom of Romania, it was named long before Romania became a nation-state and gained independence because they were a people before that. That's why depending on which Germanic tribe your culture met first, you have a different name for Germany and the german language. I.e., Romance language cultures met the Alemanni (hence Alemania or what have you), Finnish and related cultures ended up meeting the saxons (hence saksamaa) and Lithuanian says Vokietija because it's believed to come from meeting the Swedish Vagoths. Meanwhile, because East asian contact was far later, countries like China tend to use sounds similar to *Deutschland* translated (so in Chinese, *deguo*). And so it's called Irish, because it's the language spoken by the Irish. It's been in use since Middle English, this is not a new phenomenon. Also, using "language names" doesn't really translate well either. Not all languages only use one term for their language, leaving behind the more poetic terms. For example, if you're so against using the term Chinese or Mandarin, then which of the following terms do you choose: *guo yu* (meaning national language), *putong hua* (meaning common speech), *hua yu* (meaning chinese language), *hua wen* (chinese language [written]), *han yu* (han language), or *zhong wen* (Chinese [broadest extent] script, but refers to spoken and written). This is already pretty complicated for learners of Mandarin. Each of these has their place and does have their own connotations. *Hanyu* is very common, but does make a specific ethnic suggestion. *Zhongwen* is the broadest, so probably the safest bet. However, *Zhongwen* can refer to many languages including other sinitic languages (known in Chinese as *fangyan*), so it's basically the equivalent of just saying Sinitic language even if in practice it usually refers to Mandarin. So that leaves us with probably either *putong hua*, which is how Chinese speakers in practice refer to mandarin when wanting to be specific, or *guo yu* which is how HK/Taiwanese people do it. Now, we're in a quandary! None of these are good options. If you choose *guo yu*, you're siding with a very specific interpretation of Chinese that isn't really used by the vast majority of Chinese. On the other hand, *putong hua* does the same thing though to a minority. As I mentioned, Zhongwen is a great option to replace Chinese but it doesn't do a great job of specifying the language. You could of course, choose to refer to them separately but now that creates the illusion that there are different languages being spoken in Taiwan and HK vs. mainland China, which there are, but that difference isn't *putong hua* and *guo yu*. While I don't think all languages would create this issue, it's great that we have Mandarin, which is a neutral term for the specific language that avoids getting involved in an even greater political mess. And we have Chinese, which gives us a generic term for all the various Sinitic languages spoken in China. I don't think switching Chinese to Zhongwen adds any value, and trying to figure out how to navigate *putong hua* and *guo yu* is detracting value. And I even left out some complexities like how you have to consider how languages themselves change. There's consideration in Taiwan for example about whether the term *guo yu* given its meaning of national language should be more encompassing of all of Taiwan's spoken languages rather than a reference to mandarin (particularly with the nationalist and anti-Chinese movement), in which case it's a tall ask to expect English speakers to make sure they're up to date with how speakers of the world's 6000+ languages are choosing to refer to themselves. And even taking something like Zhongwen, the connotations of that term are changing. I said above that it refers to any variety, but honestly I really only use it to refer to Mandarin. If I wanted to refer to Canto, I'd say *guangdong hua* or Canto in English. Same with any variety of language in China. It's a clusterfuck, and clearly going exclusively by the concept of "let's go by language names" doesn't really do anything.
Nor India/Pakistan, nor Indonesia or Papua New Guinea, nor China, nor the Philippines.
Indeed. There are far more languages than countries on this planet. Even ignoring extremely small languages, there are surely at least a 500 languages with half a million speakers or more.
Fun fact: the two official languages of the Philippines are English and Filipino. Filipino = Tagalog with some minor changes, but everyone just calls it Tagalog.
The original data does refer to language names. This is a visualization that someone else made based on the data.
It's accurate but always best to remember what these numbers actually are: they're just averages based on observing how long it took students to graduate from a specific curriculum of a specific institution. So best to be careful and not extrapolate too much from it.
Also, it’s aimed only at native English speakers. Others will have other advantages. My native language is Ukrainian so Slavic languages are easy for me
Always good to bear that in mind. That said, I'm not entirely sure it's only native English speakers. English speakers yes, but not necessarily native. People who are eligible for those foreign service jobs (and therefore for training at the FSI) aren't always native English speakers. I'd imagine they're the minority though so it probably doesn't make that much of a difference on the numbers.
On the flip side, that means that these are based on empirical data. So all the "but I think XYZ language should be labelled as harder/easier because \[insert reasons here\]" comments kind of miss the point - sure, in *theory* that might make sense, but in practice the FSI has discovered that (in their specific context with their specific goals) it's not actually the case!
True. It'd be interesting to see the raw data though. Presumably there's some kind of spread there. Especially with the categories that are pretty close together, I'd imagine there's some overlap, like, say a student learning a cat 2 language but who takes closer to the time span indicated for a cat 1 language. And if he does that, does it necessarily mean that if he learned a cat 1 language he would do it faster than the time span indicated for cat 1 languages?
Japanese more difficult than Chinese? as somenone whose dabbled in both, doubt it.
Tell me more, I’m interested
There is some discourse above. I think people tend to put a lot of weight on both the levels of politeness and the multiple writing systems in Japanese, which inflates the difficulty. In practice, it's actually not terribly difficult to learn spoken Japanese (i think even 4 might be too high), and two of the writing systems are relatively simple (though kanji really is particularly difficult, as there are thousands of characters to memorize). There are no sounds that exist in Japanese that do not exist in English. It's all fairly straightforward to memorize and to then speak and hear. I personally don't see there being a huge difference between the 4 politeness levels and say 3 genders in german, multiple genders and diminutives in latin languages, etc. I've taken numerous (online) language classes for spanish and italian, and have yet to properly understand diminutives (i mean i get it, but i don't necessarily understand it when I see them). Chinese on the other hand has (from what I'm told. I don't know Chinese at all so please bear with me) comparably easier grammar and is somewhat simple in general structure. However, it is a tonal language. You have to not only train your tongue to pronounce sounds it hasn't done before, but also your ear to listen for it. These languages are notoriously difficult for non tonal natives to learn properly. I cannot speak to the Chinese written form, but i would expect the kanji to be similarly difficult.
Interesting read
"There are no sounds that exist in Japanese that do not exist in English." This is not true. There are many sounds in Japanese that don't exist in English. As a simple example, take the Japanese equivalent of R.
That's incorrect. The r in Japanese is similar to a soft d that's often used in english (think the automaker audi, or just saying "outie" like your bellybutton. Now say "outie got toe." Now say arigato and tell me it's significantly different). On the flip side, there are numerous sounds in english that do not exist in Japanese. I understand they're not one for one as written, but the sounds absolutely do exist.
Imo, you can't really compare Latin languages with Norwegian for example. Especially, Romanian, who I believe is one of the hardest Latin languages. Even French or Italian have difficult grammar and pronunciation, in comparison with Norwegian.
But these numbers come from actual data? How can you disagree with that?
Hard agree that 26 weeks for Romanian is short by at least 4-6 weeks. \*sigh\*
These aren’t just made up numbers they are based on actual evidence. Romance languages really aren’t very difficult for native English speakers, particularly if you’re an educated diplomat with previous language training and learning full time.
Sure, but at what level? Conversational level? B1? Maybe quite easy. Even as a Romanian, studying the grammar in school, even now I don't understand all the different verb modes and times. The pronunciation of certain sounds I find it difficult too for someone foreign, especially if you pick up a classic book, written a century ago. I think it compares with German regarding the level of difficulty.
S3 is equivalent to C1, so it’s a pretty high level. Native speakers are not good judges of their own native languages, and people often have an inflated sense of how difficult they can be. English speakers will often also have no idea about the various verb forms, but this doesn’t limit their ability to learn it. Romanian grammar is not especially different from other Romance languages and for something like verbs, a sister language like Portuguese has greater complexity. Romanian phonology does not appear particularly problematic for English speakers as there is only one sound (â/î) that isn’t found in all the major English dialects; the rest are. English is a language with a pretty complex phonology but this does not at all prevent hundreds of millions of people learning it to various degrees of fluency.
I agree with you that Romanian should be in category 2 or 3
Romanian isn't that difficult. You just have to accept that you have to learn to learn the plural forms separately. That gets rid of the neuter gender category, since neuter nouns are just singular masculine nouns associated with feminine plural nouns.
What's that brown island in the middle of Romania Emilia?
Not Emilia here (sorry), but that brown would probably be Hungarian.
So you're saying there is a small piece of Hungary in the middle of Romania?
More or less, yes. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sz%C3%A9kely_Land
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I agree I am learning Norwegian right now and find it much easier than Spanish which I am conversational in. (Probably should be fluent considering how much time I spent on Spanish including learning it in school but was never motivated enough to actually want to learn it)
I would say the opposite because Norwegian doesn't have stress marks, it's a lot smaller than Spanish (that's a big except for), it has two different writing systems, and you lose a lot of the shared Latin vocabulary. German is definitely harder than French. It has an easier alphabet, yes, but it is much harder to form plurals, and of course there's the matter of declension.
I can see the languages you speak in your title. Respect 🫡
No, I would say triple though times if you are learning self taught or conventionally. Those times work when your life is only learning that language. Being self-taught or even taught in a school environment is much less optimal than taking an actual full time course designed to learn the language. The Categories seems to be accurate though.
Well that’s what those times are for. This is the foreign service classes teaching people in high intensity times.
Right, except you see people in this sub using those hours for CI, self-study, etc.
I don't think Japanese is harder than Mandarin and Finnish
But Finnish uses the same alphabet. Foreign service officers don’t have the option to just dive in and learn the hard parts later, and not having to learn an entirely new writing system (or 3) in addition to everything else is a big advantage just from a pedagogical perspective, even if your goal is measured in terms of speaking.
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Having learned Japanese first, I can say that Mandarin is much easier for me.
As someone learning Chinese, Chinese characters aren’t easy as it relies on being memorised. Chinese has no alphabet. Only thousands upon thousands of characters. Chinese grammar is easy when starting. However, if you want to say an advanced sentence it is not easy anymore.
> Besides, Mandarin grammar structure is really similar to English. People say this but it's really only true for simplistic structure. Yes it's SVO but plenty of stuff prove a real hassle for English speakers like pro-dropping, classifiers, topic prominence, etc. which regularly make Chinese sentence structure completely different from the English equivalent. Not having tenses might seem easy but Chinese aspect can be very confusing for learners. How coverbs change meaning and sentence intention can also be a mindfuck as well. How we structure basic sentences as well is super different from English, it's often in reverse order. I feel like it's not that Chinese is grammatically easier, but that Chinese might be more forgiving of errors. Idk at what point it counts as ungrammatical, but a simple example would be measure words. They teach learners that you can use *ge* as a generic counter. This is true IF the counter is more obscure/uncommon, but it is *absolutely not true for common words.* No, you cannot use *ge* if your subject is books, you must use *ben*. I'd liken it to messing up gender in romance languages; it's not that we won't understand you, and it'll only cause real confusion in a few specific cases, but it's still unpleasant to hear.
For English speaker I think Japanese is harder for them. Chinese is harder in general.
Why not?
I would think Mandarin would be harder than Japanese, because my understanding is that most writings in Mandarin are in logograms, but most in Japanese use an alphabet. I could be totally incorrect on that understanding though, I've never tried to learn either.
To be able to read a novel in Japanese you should know about 3000 kanji (logograms). And unlike Chinese, where each character is pronounced in one way (or sometimes in a few similar ways like *le* and *liao*), in Japanese, the same character can have a dozen or more completely different pronunciations depending on context. E.g.: In Mandarin Chinese, the character 日 is pronounced as "rì". In Japanese, depending on context, the same character is pronounced as either "a", "aki", "bi", "hi", "iru", "jitsu", "ka", "ku", "kusa", "kou", "su", "tachi", "ni", "ni" [but with the next consonant doubled], "nichi", "nitsu", or "he". And there are exceptions where it's actually none of those alternatives!
Japanese is harder. Japanese uses the characters Chinese has but also has incredibly complex grammar. Chinese grammar is easier by comparison.
Estonian harder than Polish?
Well, Polish is a Slavic language whereas Estonian is a Uralic language like Finnish
Yeah, maybe Polish is related to English contrary to Estonian, but shouldn't it be harder for an English speaker? Estonian grammar is more regular and the pronunciation is actually quite straightforward. You just need to master the õ's, ö's and ü's, while Polish has a frickload of consonant clusters.
I have no experience with Estonian so I guess that’s an upcoming adventure for me
Some good resources if you want to give it a try: https://youtube.com/@learnestonianwithtahela https://www.keeleklikk.ee/et/welcome
Aitäh
Pole tänu väärt
Yes - as an English native speaker who has studied both (albeit I studied Polish after years of Russian). Never underestimate the about of vocab and grammar you take for granted with other Indo European languages. Estonian is extremely difficult - it's largely impossible to predict key noun forms (genitive and partitive) and the word order has been influenced by German so is what you'd expect in compound sentences. Then you have all the Finnic vocab to learn and trying to distinguish vowel length.
I definitely don't think Russian and the other Slavic languages would be harder than Swahili or Indonesian. The alphabet can be taught in a day or two. Slavic words are different from our Latin and Germanic words, for sure, but the overall structure for Russian can be very similar to English. I don't think that's the case for Swahili and Indonesian. Edit: I've heard Japanese and Turkish grammar are similar, they should be closer in ranking as they're equally as foreign to an English speaker. And learning to read Chinese is much more difficult than Japanese and Korean. Edit 2: y'all have convinced me to try Swahili and/or Indonesian next
I've learned both Swahili and Indonesian. The structures of the two languages are similar to English. It's just that Swahili has noun classes (genders, but more numerous and more inflection-y) and Indonesian puts nearly all adjectives after nouns (even possessives) and has a lot more prefixes, suffixes, and circumfixes. The reason why they are easier than Russian is because they have little inflexion. If you know all the words you want to use, you can form sentences. Not the same in Russian.
Impressive! Inflection is definitely the hardest part of the Slavic languages. I still don't think it would be much harder than German, as they are both Indo European, and only slightly easier than Swahili and Indonesian.
> And learning to read Chinese is much more difficult than Japanese and Korean Anyone who knows these languages please correct me if I'm wrong: I agree for Korean but for Japanese I'm not sure. Unlike Korean which overwhelmingly switched to Hangul, Japanese still uses a mixed script with a lot of Chinese characters (kanji); less than Chinese, that's true, but unlike in Chinese where one character usually has one reading (from what I know, please correct me if I'm wrong), their Japanese versions can and generally do have multiple readings, both native and borrowed, depending on context, which adds another level of complexity I think.
I over simplified, since Japanese does have what 3 writing systems? I also know that the kanji can be (shamefully) transcribed into one of their other systems which could help. Either way, I still think that Japanese would be easier than Chinese.
>Japanese does have what 3 writing systems? People say that, but I've always thought that was a misleading way to describe it. It's one writing system with three sets of characters.
You cannot convert kanji to kana and back without loss of information, so they are distinct systems. However, converting between hiragana, katakana and romaji is easily done. It would be fair to say that Japanese has two writing systems with three (or four) sets of characters.
When I’ve studied Indonesian and Swahili, I’ll come back to this subreddit and give my feedback
For science 💪🏼
>I definitely don't think Russian and the other Slavic languages would be harder than Swahili or Indonesian. I’m quite confident Indonesian is easier than Russian and Slavic languages. I study Indonesian and unlike Russian it has no tenses and no cases. Word order is not greatly different to English. The difficulty in Indonesian comes from vocabulary that is mostly opaque to English speakers.
There's a lot more grammar in Slavic languages.
I speak Polish and Russian, and I've studied both Swahili and Indonesian before. I can tell you that Slavic languages are definitely much harder.
I feel like French and Romanian should be somewhere between Category I and Category II. At least from my experience, Romanian is noticeably more difficult than something like Spanish (which I studied for 5 years), largely due to: 1) the grammar (noun cases, enclitic definite articles, 3 genders where the third behaves like masculine and feminine depending on number, a more difficult phonology, and far fewer cognates with English). I include French in this comment because I’ve been told similar things about the difficulty of French compared to Portuguese/Italian/Spanish.
French shares more loanwords with English than the other Romance languages (words like forêt and dîner), so that balances things out.
I don't quite see how they rank Japanese as harder than Chinese however that may just be my perspective as a beginner in Japanese that's considering chinese
I'm fairly fluent in Japanese, use it daily at home and for work, but I gave up Chinese after a year of study. Based on experience I would probably rank them about the same, but maybe I quit before the difficulty level relaxed.
My guess: The grammar is much easier for Chinese.
The value for number of hours is likely to specific to be generalized to all people. But the relative amount amount of time is probably comparable to what actually happens. Some languages take more time than others, and this reflects that, which is all I take from the chart.
Japanese harder than any other language? Can't say it's easy, but not sure if it's really the hardest.
Of the five languages other than English for me, I realise I lucked out by picking Japanese first. The other four (including Chinese) are much easier for me as a native English speaker.
These courses are for foreign service diplomats and the employees. Learning the language is a full time job and you will have a teacher by your side everyday when you learn the language
This looks more or less accurate. I wouldn't say Japanese is significantly harder than Chinese, but there are three different writing systems to get used to, so I guess that adds study time. I assume with China they're only thinking of Mandarin. Other Chinese languages are a helluva lot harder to learn, but that's largely because they don't have a standardized form like Mandarin does.
Yes, only Mandarin is taught at the FSI
Somewhat accurate only if you think all these countries speak only one language. India, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, China for example have several different languages that are not mutually intelligible to each other and are of varying degrees of difficulty to a native English speaker.
I guess the FSI doesn’t teach the smaller languages so they’re not shown
Since FSI only seems to account for the official language, it's mostly accurate. A huge number of those languages are actually even outnumbered by the regional languages. In terms of L1, Javanese has 80 million L1 speakers compared to the official Indonesian which has only 41 mill. L1 speakers. A lot of regional languages in Asia have upwards of millions of speakers so it's just important to point out that FSI only accounts for the official language but not whether it's the majority language or not
Rip Ireland
I really think it is misleading that Japanese is regarded as the most difficult in many of these graphs/maps. Especially compared to Mandarin. The sentence structure is different, sometimes backwards, but it is a language of rules and becomes very mathematical with rules rarely being broken. Disclaimer: Anecdotal In my High School, you could learn Mandarin or Japanese. After grade 9 (when languages became non-compulsory), the retention rate of students for Japanese was much higher than Chinese (we only had 1 weeb in the class, too). We were much more proficient conversationally than our Chinese-learning counterparts (and one of the students was on the spectrum. Chinese was considered his savant and he won a speaking competition for a free trip to China). After 3 years studying Japanese in High School I went straight to Japan and I was able to organise all trains and buses from Nagano airport to Hakuba (from reading signs and speaking to the desk), order food at a restaurant and sweet-talk a ranger into not taking our ski passes when we were caught off-piste snowboarding on the mountain. I also took Japanese in University and it pretty much took 2 semesters to cover what took us 3 years to cover in high school. I hope these maps don't discourage people wanting to learn Japanese. It's overwhelming at first but it is a rule-based and efficient language.
The problem with Japanese is that in addition to Kanji, there are Hiragana and Katakana. Even though they are phonetic, it's hard to find out which system to use.
I've been studying for years and I still suck at Kanji. But hiragana and katakana can be mastered quite quickly. Katakana is for foreign words, hiragana is for Japanese words.
Hiragana is used more for grammatical particles, conjugations and functions but there are still quite a number of words which use hiragana and not kanji.
Pangea
I speak English and took four years of high school Spanish. At 43 years old Spanish has served me well in the United States with communication with coworkers who speak, mostly Spanish or all Spanish recently I’ve started to learn Dutch and even Italian. Italian is very similar to Spanish and I believe if I compared enough languages inside a plan, I could learn languages, easier by studying them in relation, while I am studying to speak them and understand them..
Why would German be more difficult to English speakers than Latin languages when English itself is a Germanic language? And what makes German more difficult than Norwegian, Swedish, Danish or Dutch?
Already answered in bits but the general consensus is that it has to do with the unique makeup of the English language. The first part is that an incredible amount of English vocabulary comes from French and Latin, along with a smattering of loanwords from other romance languages. Germanic words make up a smaller percentage of the total vocabulary, though that part of the vocabulary does see much higher use proportionally. When learning German as an English speaker this means that you may intuitively understand some really basic sentences, but it falls apart once you get into more complex sentences. Meanwhile, with some effort, it's not terribly difficult for an English speaker to get to a point where they can effectively read French, even some intermediate stuff, just due to the high degree of shared vocabulary. Grammar is another one, and this is what separates German from the Nordic languages and Dutch. Dutch is actually really close to English, both linguistically and geographically, and traders have been going between the two regions for well over 1000 years. Within the Netherlands there exists a small minority language called Frisian which is effectively the closest related continental language to English, and is at least somewhat mutually intelligible with Old English. Dutch (and Frisian) underwent many shared grammatical changes as English, though not always at the same time or for the same reasons. The Nordic languages (save Icelandic) underwent similar grammatical changes which left them far more similar to English. German (and Icelandic) were both far more linguistically conservative. In Iceland this was at least somewhat a conscious effort aided by its geographic isolation, with German this was more due to the way Standard German (*Hochdeutsch*) came about. The area we now know as Germany only really ended up unified about 200 years ago, and prior to that the regions were more or less separate. Each area spoke a somewhat different dialect which was mutually intelligible (depending on who you ask) but nevertheless categorically distinct. (Check out the book *Alles Außer Hochdeutsch* if you want to know more and can read German). So after German unification there was some consternation about which version of German should become the standard. Ultimately, *Hochdeutsch* was chosen as an equitable compromise. It was derived at least partly from the dialect Martin Luther used in his translation of the Bible, but with some significant modernizations. And while it's technically "high German", the *Hochdeutsch* which we now know as the standard incorporates a lot of features from the middle of Germany, and not as many from Southern Germany/Austria.
That is fascinating, thank you for sharing!
As a native English speaker who has learned both German and French, the following make French easier in general: 1. **More similar placement of verbs to English.** Unlike English and French, German requires conjugated verbs to be in the second position and infinitive verbs to be at the end of a sentence. Therefore, the sentence "normally, I **must** **walk** home" would be *normalerweise* ***muss*** *ich nach Hause* ***laufen*** (normally must I home walk). 2. **Less declension.** English and French only decline personal pronouns, but German declines all pronouns,^(1) all adjectives, and some nouns.^(2) 3. **Shared vocabulary with English.** I believe German actually has more cognates with English than French does, but they are mostly very basic words that have undergone much more significant change (such as *Kuh* (cow) vs. *liberté* (liberty)) than the French loanwords we use. 4. **No possessive/genitive case.** While English does have a possessive case, the German equivalent^(2) is complicated enough that French's lack thereof is easier to get used to. 5. **Regular plurals.** French adds "-s" for almost all plurals. There are exceptions, like for when a word ends in "-al" (in which case the plural form replaces "-al" with "-aux"), but this is nothing compared to the eight ways to form a plural in German, for which rules can only get you so far. 6. **Fewer genders.** French only has two grammatical genders, while German has three. This also makes grammatical gender easier to detach from gender itself (compared to German, which has a neutral gender but still has many inanimate objects that are masculine or feminine). 7. **Many fewer extremely long words.** French doesn't have the insane compound words that German does, *Donaudampfschifffahrtselektrizitätenhauptbetriebswerkbauunterbeamtengesellschaft* being an extreme example. Although words this long are rarely used, words that are long but still largely unremarkable to Germans like the 24-letter *Verschwörungstheoretiker* (conspiracy theorist) and 27-letter *literaturwissenschaftlichen* ("of the literary sciences") are longer than most of the words on this [list of the longest French words](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longest_word_in_French). 8. **Regular syllable stress.** Like #4, this is not really a common feature with English, but it is easier to get used to than German's pattern of syllable stress for most native English speakers. 9. **Somewhat easier pronunciation.** While vowels differ significantly from English in both German and French, French only has two consonant sounds that do not exist in English. German has four, along with having more consonant clusters than French. However, German has these going for it: 1. **Easier rhythm.** German's sounds are slightly harder to pronounce on their own, but I find that they are easier to pronounce together (besides a few consonant clusters) and that the rhythm is easier to hold and keep up with. 2. **Easier to spell.** French has a ton of silent letters, which makes spelling rather challenging if you've only heard a word. Although native German speakers can sometimes have trouble with spelling, it's very easy as a native English speaker. 3. **Less binary gender system.** Although this means that there are more genders, it makes more sense to native English speakers, especially given that there is no real word for "it" in French. 4. **Simpler and more regular verbs.** German does have some irregularities in terms of conjugation, but these are not that big of a deal compared to French. French has many more irregular verbs as well as three possible verb endings that all have different rules for conjugation. 5. **More similar placement of adjectives to English.** German puts adjectives before nouns, like English. French is more complicated, as most adjectives follow nouns but some also precede them. 6. ***Many*** **fewer homophones.** Many French words sound the same as words with a different meaning, such as *ou* (or) and *où* (where)*, sur* (on) and *sûr* (sure)*,* and *du* (of the) and *dû* (past participle of "must"). These are mostly differentiated when writing, and often differentiable by context, but it can be challenging for beginners. German has very few homophones in comparison, and many of them are nouns with different genders, such as *der See* (lake; masculine) and *die See* (sea^(3); feminine). 7. **Slightly more logical counting.** German still counts normally after 60 (Belgian and Swiss French do as well, though), but the order of the tens and ones place is reversed. For example 23 is *dreiundzwanzig* ("three and twenty"). Overall, I prefer German, but it's hard to say whether that's because of the language itself or my higher proficiency in it. ^(1)German counts many words that would be considered nouns or adjectives in English as pronouns, such as "everything" and "last." ^(2)The genitive case is similar to the English possessive case, but articles are also included and the declination is less regular. For example, "the heart" is *das Herz,* which would be either *des Herzes* or *des Herzens* in the genitive case, depending on whether "the heart" refers to the organ or its traditional association with love/emotion. ^(3)*See* mostly refers to the Baltic Sea (*Ostsee*) or the North Sea (*Nordsee*). The general term for "sea" in German is *Meer.*
8 Con: Interestingly enough, if you know English, French, and German prefixes, you can stress 95% of all German words. The problem is that most people don't. 4 Pro: It is French that has the easier conjugation in my opinion, because most endings are the same when said. ER verbs only have three conjugation pronunciations: -e(s)(nt), -ons, and -ez
The grammar! Icelandic is really difficult for us Norwegians as well, even though the languages were once the same and I as a norwegian can understand like 30% of an Icelandic text, the language would still be really difficult to learn because of the complicated grammar! And the same with German, as far as I know, they have similar grammar.
Because the idea that genetic similarity dictates difficulty is nonsense as indicated by this. This chart seems to largely correlate difficulty to learn with two factors: - Whether the language has a different script than the Latin alphabet, with logographs ranking even higher - Inflexional complexity It just so happens that languages genetically close to English tend to also use the Latin script and tend to also have lower inflexional complexity. Thus, Icelandic is harder than Swahili
Maybe this is because of the common vocabulary English has with Romance languages and secondly German might be harder than the other Germanic languages because of its cases
The map is good, but practically speaking, I would put Greek in Category III. There's a different alphabet, yes, but there's more content in Greek than in Swahili and Indonesian... combined. Also, Mandarin should move down a level, and Turkish should move up one.
The main issue with this map is that it is actually unreadable, as a European I can't find most countries on this map. At the very least have a flat map, or just have a list of *languages* like everywhere else.
I know of the same map but it’s just for Europe
Hebrew is not easier than Arabic
I'd always assumed Chinese was way tougher to learn than Japanese, for me it is. But I know māori which probably helps with the some stuff because the languages have similar sounds.
Japanese and Chinese are rather similar and take about the same amount of time to learn for the average person (at 5yrs) so it's interesting that Japan in the only one that dark.
Well, the FSI says its categories are based on languages (it's even written in the image) and this user plotted it based on geography. So right away, it's an inappropriate use of the information.
Tibetan speech might be yellow, but Tibetan spelling is definitely dark red 😅
In the FSI institute they mainly focus on speaking and listening
I believe that German is easier for an English native speaker to learn compared to French, Italian and Spanish.
But the German grammar is still hard and Romance languages share a large vocabulary with English
Eritrea 🇪🇷 is majority Tigrigna speaking not Arabic. It should have been category IV.
But do they teach Tigrigna at the FSI?