Difficulty of learning languages

Many languages have been claimed to be the hardest language to learn. Assessments have been used to determine language difficulty based on: the ease with which infants learn a language as their first language and how challenging language is to learn as a second language by older children or adults.

Natural acquisition

The question of the most difficult language to acquire as a first language can be considered by determining when children are able to speak grammatically correctly, as judged by adult speakers. Research along these lines is sparse, however.

As a second language

Learning a language as an adult strongly depends on the learner's native language. Therefore it is meaningless to make a universal ranking of difficulty. For example, a native English speaker will learn Frisian - and vice versa - much more easily than a native Japanese speaker would. In general, the closer the second language is in relation to vocabulary, sounds, sentence structure, culture, and other factors to the learner's native tongue and culture, the easier acquisition will be. This "proximity" of the target language is not necessarily a function of genetic relationship but may also be polyphyletic, such as a chance similarity of phonology. English speakers often consider Spanish to be very easy to learn, for example, even though Spanish is not the closest relative of English. Differences in phonology are often insurmountable for the learner, and will be apparent in an accent in non-native speakers even after many years of proficient use of the learned language. Acquisition of native phonology is also complete very early in children's language acquisition, before the age of one year: that is, what is the "easiest" part of language acquisition for infants (completed first) is the "hardest" part for adult learners (completed last, if ever).

The question which of two given languages A and B is more difficult to learn may be considered by comparing the performance of native speakers of A learning B with that of native speakers of B learning A. For example, a study on speech comprehension by German immigrants to the USA and American immigrants to Germany found that native English speakers learning German as adults had a disadvantage on certain grammatical tasks, while they had an advantage in lexical tasks compared to their native German-speaking counterparts learning English.^[1]

Possibility of acquisition

If taken literally, the hardest languages for outsiders to learn would be those that are currently unknown by outsiders, for example, Sentinelese. Sentinelese is completely unattested, and no Sentinelese have had significant contact with outsiders for several centuries, so it cannot be learned anywhere but on North Sentinel Island. It is illegal for anyone to visit the island, however, and those fishermen who have occasionally washed up on its shores have all been killed by the Sentinelese.^{[citation needed]}

For English speakers

Diplomats and defense language training provides some interesting data, although it covers only a limited selection of major national languages:

The Foreign Service Institute (FSI) of the US Department of State has compiled approximate learning expectations for a number of languages. Of the 63 languages analyzed, the five most difficult languages to reach proficiency in speaking and proficiency in reading (for native English speakers who already know other languages), requiring 88 weeks, are: "Arabic, Cantonese, Mandarin, Japanese, Korean", with KOREAN being the most difficult.^[2] *Japanese is not the most difficult. Please do not edit without proper empirical evidence.

Objective difficulty

During the era of colonialism, when racialist theories held sway in anthropology (and thus in linguistics), many linguists believed that "primitive" (and presumably unintelligent) people spoke "primitive" languages, and that one sign of a primitive language was its simplicity, compared to the complexity of the "civilized" languages of more (technologically) advanced races. There was even a typological cline of morphological complexity, with isolating languages like Chinese the simplest and most primitive, agglutinating languages like Turkish intermediate, and inflecting languages like Latin, Greek, or Sanskrit the most complex and advanced. (The even greater morphological complexity of polysynthetic Native American and Australian languages was conveniently overlooked.) In reaction to this idea, it became conventional to say that all languages are equal, and that all are equally complex.

References

^ Scherag, A., Demuth, L., Rösler, F., Neville, H.J., Röder, B., The effects of late acquisition of L2 and the consequences of immigration on L1 for semantic and morpho-syntactic language aspects. Cognition 93 (2004),B97-B108.
^ (2007) [1] National Virtual Translation Center

External links

What is the most difficult language to learn?, Johns Hopkins Magazine (1999)
Which is the hardest language?

[1] Scherag, A., Demuth, L., Rösler, F., Neville, H.J., Röder, B., The effects of late acquisition of L2 and the consequences of immigration on L1 for semantic and morpho-syntactic language aspects. Cognition 93 (2004),B97-B108.

[2] (2007) [1] National Virtual Translation Center

[1]

[2]