Difficulty of learning languages
THE HARDEST LANGUAGE TO LEARN IS INDEED ENGLISH. After that comes the east of Asia which would be Japanese and chinese. 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]
Native English speakers
The Foreign Service Institute (FSI) of the US Department of State has compiled approximate learning expectations for a number of languages for their professional staff (native English speakers who generally already know other languages). Of the 63 languages analyzed, the five most difficult languages to reach proficiency in speaking and reading, requiring 88 weeks (2200 class hours), are Arabic, Cantonese, Mandarin, Japanese, and Korean. The Foreign Service Institute notes that Japanese is typically more difficult to learn than other languages in this group.[2]
See also
- Critical period hypothesis
- International auxiliary language
- Language learning aptitude
- Language acquisition
- Language complexity
- Motivation in second language learning
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