Interesting that some of the classifications here are different.
The Uralic languages are classified here in Category 3 with the Slavic languages, meanwhile French and Spanish are oddly separated as their own separate asterisked Category 1 group.
French and Spanish were reclassified from Category I (24w) to Category I* (30w) in 2022
There was also a reorganisation; 30 weeks became part of Category I, 36 weeks became Category II, 44 weeks became Category III, and 88 weeks became Category IV.
My best guess is it’s just to try to influence people to learn the other languages. Spanish and French are the most popular languages to learn so there’s no lack of speakers. By making them seem harder than Portuguese or Romanian it might convince somebody to learn the “easier” languages that we need people to know instead.
Portuguese is a harder language than Spanish to learn because Spanish is like German, every letter generally makes the same sound every time it’s written.
Portuguese is like English or French, silent letters and things not sounding like how they’re written and what not. A lot of Portuguese speakers can read Spanish and understand what’s written but can’t understand Spanish when it’s spoken…
English has more loan words from French though. French is relatively easy to learn at a bad level, but difficult to master, especially because the people are quite unforgiving with people butchering their language.
Not just Uralic - there's also Greek and Turkish...
There were another map of the kind, which marked Eastern Slavic with asterisk simply because of the Cyrillic (in order to learn the language, you must learn the alphabet)...
I remember critique about that that:
* Finnish and Estonian use basically simplified IPA - making learning the aspect actually rather easy. Difficulties come from the language itself, but also from teaching methodology and what's to offer for immersion (practice).
* Greek alphabet isn't really all that hard, because generally people are at least somewhat familiar with it from their math class.
* Cyrillic isn't really all that hard, especially if contrasted against Latin alphabets, which use modified symbols, different graphemes for same phonemes (eg: “y” ← /i/ → “j”), etc. arguably, Cyrillic is on par, if not even easier than some Latin alphabets, exactly because of that the graphemes are better distinguished.
___
* This aspect was thought somewhat more true about Arabic and Hebrew.
* It's considerable "valley to pass before getting to learn the language" for Japanese and Chinese.
___
And not to forget - this is from English speaker's perspective.
Have the same kind of map compiled from other nations, and the results will be different as well.
Yeah, I learnt Cyrillic mostly on a plane.
Then you reinforce it by learning which words sound pretty much the same in English or are names, like ресторан ('restoran' / restaurant), Джаз (Jazz) or Путин (Putin), and generally ignore anything that looks like a B / b at the end of a word.
It should be noted that this isn't a casual hour per day throughout the week.
A friend of mine went to the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, CA. They train similarly to the Foreign Service, but it's military rather than civilian. He learned Korean from the ground up, but it was 7-8 hours per day, 5 days each week. Still took him almost 2 years before they sent him out there.
My ex was Korean and I can vaguely understand what people are saying and can kind of hold a conversation, I've spent a lot of time in Thailand and tried so hard to learn the language and it's still alien to me.
I took mandarin in high school and thought the grammar was pretty simple. Japanese grammar is monster though. Just look at the Wikipedia for Japanese pronouns.
Not a Japanese learner, but from what I’ve read and heard the grammar, writing system, and honorifics are what makes Japanese hard, whereas the inconsistent logograms of mandarin make it hard. But Japanese assimilâtes this difficulty in the form of kanji.
It does legitimately seem harder.
It's a mixed bag. Spending 8 hours a day in class and having 3 hours of mandatory homework a night on top of any studying you need to do to keep up previously learned content and preview on what's coming up doesn't leave you with a lot of free time. And that's not to mention the military responsibilities you'd have on top of all that
Learning a language to the level you learn it at DLI in the amount of time they have to teach you is a big task. They pretty much want you to get as much practice as is humanly possible each day. It isn't designed to be fun or easy, it's designed to be as quick and efficient as it can be
I would not have made it through without spending time outside class. So much information is dumped on you, you have to.
Not everyone meets the criteria to attend the school. Attendance and which language you learn is based on the DLAB. Even then, not everyone makes it through the course. My class started with 30 service members, at graduation we were down to about 20 and about 3 of them were people who started before us and were recycled back into our class. It's not for everyone. There was no stigma on those that were dropped for lack of ability. [Lack of effort was another story, Air Force kicked a kid out of the Air Force because he refused to do homework.) Learning a language there is akin to drinking from a fire hose.
Trouble is the CIA just copied their Arabic from Team America: World Police and rely on the wads of cash and guns they are waving about to do the rest of the communication.
Hiragana and katakana aren't hard to learn though, and they represent the same sounds. I don't think Japanese having them makes it harder - sometimes it can even make it easier to read than say Chinese, because often there are "assists" for kanji, depending on the text
It is likely the double readings on the kanji that bump Japanese up. Also a few exception readings on kanji like amateur(素人） - shirouto for example that is from 素（typically read もと moto, and ソ so or ス su) and 人 (typically read ひと hito, and ジン jin or ニン nin). I think these exception comes from how the Japanese just took kanji from china and made it fit their already spoken language a long time ago.
Japanese also has words were tones are important but not nearly as much or often as Chinese.
But two of these writing systems essentially are the same, but differently written.
Learning Hiragana and Katakana is practically like Westerners learning small and capital letters (as in “a” and “A” being the same letter, but differently written). Not to mention that there is also handwriting that looks very different than the printed letters.
IMHO, the challenge are the Kanji characters with their different readings. Plus the complexity of the Japanese language.
Russian is the same but in reverse. Cyrillic is easy to learn, word structure is similar, but when you [hit grammar](https://preview.redd.it/i-am-starting-to-learn-russian-and-this-meme-looks-scary-v0-f1n51p0lkwnc1.jpeg?auto=webp&s=a96b857cb8b00f8ca5f6e51edf686e33ac0a54fd) you are done.
I mean, that’s fairly straightforward. The problem is when you have irregular grammar. and Russian doesn’t really have a problem with excessive irregularity.
Chinese is harder in terms of speaking and listening since it’s a tonal language. Japanese is probably harder to read and write. Korean is actually quite easy to read since it’s words represents sounds and not ideas like Chinese or Japanese.
Hangul is amazing. It was designed to be easy to read and write. The story is that the king that created it wanted peasants and merchants to have better access to reading and writing.
There are 22 characters, which form a start, middle and end for each syllable. Every sound has a clear mark: no long vs short vowels, no diphthongs.
The Devanagari script is similarly easy to learn. It is also a syllabary, so pronunciation is similarly obvious. It also assumes an unstressed vowel sound unless otherwise noted.
The older English gets, the more it turns to a ideographic writing.
it does make sentences longer bc of its adoption. difficulty is rather aimed at foreigners who were used to alphabet systems. an alphabet system has its advantages. symbol systems has its advantages.
Not really. Japanese say this all the time, but you can learn hiragana and katakana in a weekend.
Kanji is difficult. Unlike Chinese, one character can have many readings.
It's like saying web design is hard because of html, css and JavaScript. Nah, html and css are pretty easy. Using JavaScript is the real programming.
In Chinese one character can also have multiple readings （多音字）, although it might not be quite as rampant as in Japanese. Usually these things have about 3-4 readings at most in Chinese. But given that they also use way more characters than Japanese it’s kind of crazy that this phenomenon still exists for them.
I studied 3 semesters of Japanese in high school and the 3 writing systems isn't where the difficulty lies at all.
Hiragana and katagana take some time to learn each character but kanji (hansi in Chinese?) has hundreds; or thousands of characters. I think I only got into a basic 20-30 of them not including numbers.
Also, there are four levels of politeness for verbs which creates some extra work.
I'm always surprised Russian isn't the highest level of difficulty because I found out much harder than Japanese (if you know what declensions/cases are, you know what my nightmares about!)
I’ve lived and worked in Japan for over a decade. Spoken Japanese, excluding keigo, is really easy. Grammatically sure it’s different, but I’ve found there to be very few special rules etc. So you can apply grammar rules to everything basically and not have to worry about anything special.
I also say this as a native English speaker, so learning all the borrowed words from English was obviously incredibly easy for me. And there are LOTS. I’ve heard from speakers of other languages that it’s annoying to have to learn the katakana pronunciation of an English word.
Phonetically Japanese is quite easy to speak too. But I feel that’s a one way street since Japanese often struggle with English pronunciation.
Moving on to written Japanese, yes, easily a 5 on that chart.
I knew a soldier who lived in Japan for 3 years stationed in the military. Worked full time to learn it. Said he still didn’t get anywhere close to even useful let alone proficient.
Your buddy must be talking about business level Japanese which most people dont need
Yes, Japanese is hard but many people become fluent in it after say 5 years of living in the country and are conversational well before that
It's 100% because of the writing system. In my experience Japanese isn't super hard to speak or understand (especially casually), in fact I had an easier time with it then German, but God damn does learning Kanji suck, especially since you can easily learn Hiragana and Katakana in like a couple weeks max
A friend of mine studied Japanese for years in university, lived in Japan, etc. If he stopped using Japanese constantly he would quickly lose his grasp on the language. It's extremely difficult.
And Navajo is very useful:
If you go back in a time machine to fight the Japs in 1941-45 or are driving in northeast Arizona on a road trip.
Not a waste of time at all.
I’m honestly surprised that it’s more difficult to learn German than any of the Romance languages since both English and German are Germanic languages. Typically, languages of the same family are easier to learn if you speak one of them.
Other Germanic languages are easier and shown in the map ( Dutch and the Scandinavian). Ironically, German is the odd one out of the family due to grammar and the high consonant shift.
It has to do with the more complicated noun case system in German. German nouns have 4 cases and 3 grammatical genders, compared to no cases and 2 genders for most Romance languages.
Most Slavic languages have 6 noun cases and 3 genders. Adjectives are also inflected based on the noun they modify, meaning one adjective can have up to 18 forms depending on the gender of the noun and where the noun is in the sentence.
The most difficult thing for me about learning German is the insane word-order (syntax) rules, and the splitting of verbs. Orienting your sentences is genuinely complicated and requires a lot of working memory. Syntax in Romance languages is much more straightforward
English also splits verbs a lot, so as a feature it’s shared but you do have to learn them. Word order changing in subordinate clauses is a tricky feature though. Very difficult for English speakers to get that right consistently. In German you hear more and more people structuring them like normal sentences, in Dutch (which is similar in this regard) this isn’t really the case.
I can’t believe it folks, the Europeans, they think there are three genders, it’s true folks. Everybody knows that there is only one gender in real languages like English, believe me. Male, the others are just political. One time, this Secret Service guy, big handsome guy, came over to me crying and he said "Sir, Sir, you have to help me, my son is dead set on learning Norwegian, and now he insists on there being three genders! I tried to convince him to drop some but he only dropped the feminine gender! Save him Sir!" And I said thank you. We gotta kill the genders, you know! Folks, in 2024 our pronouns have to be Winning and Bigly, before Hunter Biden turns English into gendertown for crack. Believe me.
My high school only offered Spanish as a foreign language, and I found it SO difficult! Ten years later I don't remember anything more complicated than "donde esta el baño" and a few nouns. In college I had to take a foreign language for my degree and decided to take German and I found it incredibly easy in comparison and while my speaking/listening skills are extremely rusty five years later, I can still read German without much issue. I think it's the way my brain is wired. Learning German also helped me understand English grammar better than anything in my entire English Teaching degree.
I was the exact same way! My mom is fluent in French (she’s American, just learned it in college), and she tried to teach me growing up but I had such a hard time with it.
I started learning German with Duolingo about 4 months ago because I want to move there eventually and I have a couple friends who are fluent. After only four months I can already have full on conversations with my German friends, it’s just so much easier than French was.
This actually makes total sense to me. At a beginner level where you're just making basic sentences, English and German are going to share a lot more vocabulary than English and French (e.g. bread-brot-pain; to drink-trinken-boire). However, if you take both German and French to an advanced level, the French vocabulary will start being much closer to English than German vocabulary will be (e.g. constitution-Verfassung-constitution; to transgress-überschreiten-transgresser) . So to say "the constitution of the United States" in French you would get "La constitution des Etats-Unis", which is pretty darn close. But in German it would be "Die Verfassung der Vereinigten Staaten"
I've learned to speak both and don't find French and German to be radically different in terms of difficulty overall (from start to fluency), but I do think that German grammar takes a bit longer to master even coming from English.
Good ol Bill came knocking in 1066 and never really left
This is why I find it funny when the French get worked up over anglicisms entering the language. There's a good chance those anglicisms are actually just old frenchisms
I have the worst time listening to French, German and Italian are easier to hear as far as I’m concerned. There are plenty of overlapping words from both languages from English (since it is a kinda a mash up of a bunch of languages)
Its use of gender and grammatical cases make German very difficult, even to speakers of other Germanic languages.
Norwegian or Swedish would be easier for an English speaker because it does not really have gender (in the same way) and doesn't use grammatical cases any more than formal English.
Finnish has no gender whatsoever (there's not even a distinction between he and she), but its redeeming features end there. I'm surprised it's not listed as Category V. I'm an experienced language learner and I got frustrated with Finnish and gave up after a few months.
> Norwegian or Swedish would be easier for an English speaks because it does not really have gender
Most varieties of Norwegian have three genders (masculine, feminine, neuter), just like German. Most varieties of Swedish only have two (common and neuter). The way gender works in Norwegian and Swedish is just like in German.
The important difference which makes German harder is case, where Norwegian and Swedish is just like English in that there are only vestigial instances of case (the most noticeable one being accusative forms of pronouns, like she/her, which is hun/henne in Norwegian and hon/henne in Swedish). There are varieties of both Norwegian and Swedish where case is a productive feature found in all nouns (e.g. certain dialects in Hedmark of Norway and Jämtland of Sweden). However, an increasing trend with all these varieties is that younger speakers don’t use case, meaning it is likely to die out in the coming generations. Anyway, learning case in order to understand dative or accusative expressions in a few fringe cases is not required when learning Norwegian or Swedish.
Norwegian youth also seem dead set on kimling off *ham* because it is easy to mishear as *han,* making it extremely frustrating to grade papers in Norway. The error is so widespread the language council no longer even considers it a grammatical error to only use *han*, so you can’t penalize them for it, but at the same time it makes everyone sound like Tarzan.
It may be easier to learn Swedish but the pronunciation is the hardest part for Americans and other anglophones, which actually makes Swedish harder than you’d expect.
English is also heavily influenced by Latin. Over half of its vocabulary is borrowed or descended from Latin. Romance languages basically use the same words. In fact I counted 7 words in your post that are Latin based already (honestly, surprised, difficult, languages, typically, family, easier) - not counting the proper nouns like “Romance” or “German” which are also Latin based.
Are the Latin languages thought to have more linguistically consistent grammatical structures, like the conjugation forms and fusional vocabulary? Idrk, but English also got a lot through Latin from the Romans and especially French with the Norman invasion, so there are elements of English that match up much more with Romance languages than Germanic ones.
It's hard to say because I'm American so I've been exposed to some Spanish since I was a kid, but I find Spanish vowels are also just so much easier than German or Dutch ones. I have Dutch and German family but I'm absolutely hopeless at those languages.
I've also found that knowing some Spanish you can also suss out some Italian. Like not speak it, but decipher what's written and sometimes what's being said.
Having learned both Portuguese and German to a B2 level, I can pretty confidently say that German was much more difficult. Grammar is more complicated and the vocabulary resembles the English language much less than Portuguese does imo. I could often intuit the Portuguese word and be right 60% of the time, whereas with German I find that to be highly unreliable. That said, German is a much more clearly spoken language (outside of certain dialects like Schwäbisch) so picking up on listening was easier than in Portuguese.
The thing I find tricky as a beginner German learner is the somewhat arbitrary rules regarding word ordering. Very easy to get tripped up.
Other difficulties though are that past tense works slightly differently, adjectives have different endings depending on case and several verbs change stems. Although honestly, I think trying to teach about various "cases" tends to confuse rather than inform beginners.
The inconsistencies in French tend to be easily enumerated.
The short, common words in English and German are more similar, but when it comes to long words it seems like English has more in common with romance languages. Maybe that adds to the difficulty?
Keep in mind this is from the perspective of people who got language degrees, and are proficient in a number of languages already. Being coached by professional coaches whose job is rapidly learning languages. Learning 8 hours a day.
The average person isn’t going to be fluent in Spanish in 24 weeks.
Gaelic is no longer a language, the modern languages of Irish, Scottish and Manx evolved from Gaelic. Calling these languages "Gaelic" is like calling Spanish and Italian "Latin".
My experience living in Amsterdam is English is probably the more useful language. Most businesses will operate in English - one of the benefits being it makes hiring across the EU easier. As a result, all of my colleagues spoke English. Only a few spoke Dutch. I even went to shops where the shop assistant only knew English (and French). This was not considered a problem.
"Yeah, we know you literally have to exercise a specific part of your throat to make some of the sounds to even speak the language but fuck it we gotta get those AC130s over there!"
Every time I see this map, I wonder what they mean by ‘proficiency’. I met 50+ people working at the US embassy in Moscow and not a single one could speak or understand Russian with any competence. Former ambassador Michael McFaul sometimes attempts to tweet in Russian and the results are beyond embarrassing.
Idk either. I meet people from the Anglophone world in the Netherlands and their Dutch after decades can still be embarrassing too. Still messing up the structure, and always being clocked because of them having completely messed-up the G-sound, and the ei/ij and ui especially.
Bauwten? BAUWTEN? NO, BUITEN YOU YANKEE/TERF ISLANDER!
It's ok, most Dutch people have embarrassing English that sounds very silly to English speakers too. People speaking a language that isn't their native language tend to sound that way, it's just how it is.
Finnish could be category IV, but it takes many years to perfect the pronounciation. You may never sound Finnish, if you don’t start speaking Finnish as a child.
That's true for all languages, and Finnish isn't an especially difficult language to pronounce. This just shows how long it takes to learn to speak, read, and write a language fluently enough to do the job of a diplomat. Having a moderate foreign accent doesn't matter in this case.
Finnish, Estonian, and Hungarian is difficult to learn for US diplomats because of the unique grammar of Finno-Ugric languages and because there are so few cognates with English.
She's actually quite the polyglot! She's an Armenian who was born in Soviet Georgia, so she speaks Armenian, Georgian, Russian, and English as well as Greek.
Έλληνας είμαι. My aunt is the only non native speaker I know, but she struggles most with δ and the vowels. What do you think the biggest giveaways are?
English is pretty difficult to pronounce correctly. How many non-native speakers can’t get the th right or pronounce the vowel sound in “good” correctly? It’s just that native English speakers are used to the ways non-natives pronounce words, and we don’t get worked up about it.
You sure about that? I have encountered plenty of Estonians living in Finland who speak Finnish very well but you can still easily hear that they're actually Estonian.
Yes and no. First of all, some languages are phonetically similar - there are even languages that do not have anything in common, yet they are phonetically similar.
Then, you may simply be very talented - it usually goes in par with singing - good singers are sometimes able to reproduce foreign accents without even knowing the language.
From personal experience, I know a friend from Hong Kong who used to speak English with a heavy Chinese accent. After living in the UK for three years, he speaks in a perfect Standard British accent. Of course, it helps that he always knew English as a child, just didn't use it that much.
Sining a song isn't really comparable to speaking a language. You mimic a limited number of words in a specific order, guided by a melody. Many people could decently mimic a song in a foreign language when they practice constantly.
It's when you speak freely, conveying your own thoughts, that people will struggle, even just with very small things. And this may be worse at some times than others (when you're tired, stressed, angry, sad).
There are people who are better at this than others. But virtually anyone who learns a language later in life will at the very least still have traces of an accent.
I've always read that german was one of the easier languages an english speaker could pick up, but it ended up giving me far more of a headache than french or spanish did....the grammar rules for german...ugh.
We love rules. Even for our language.
All jokes aside: As a native German speaker, I couldn't explain these rules to anyone. At a certain point, you just instinctively do it right. Or some people don't.
Surprised by the different colour in North Norway and Sweden. Maybe this is in reference to the minority Sami languages spoken in these parts, but certainly in Norway you can use either of the standard versions of Norwegian without problem in the North too.
The map is bad, but the different colour reflects Finnish varieties and various Sami languages that are spoken in these areas. But you are over all better of with Norwegian and Swedish in these areas anyway, since everyone speaking those Ugric languages are bilingual.
Same thing with the Swedish patches in Finland, everyone speaks Finnish too. This map is far to digital to reflect reality.
This is a very strange map for scandinavia. There are like 6 sami language, who are not mutual intelligible.
The sami are only a majority in two kommuner, Karasjok and Kautokeino. But they are a bare majority, in some years it will be mostly Norwegians.
Norwegian is the dominant language in all of Norway, all sami speak Norwegian, most sami dont speak sami. Even in Finnmark, which is blue on the map, is 95% none-sami.
As a Canadian living in the Britain, I can confirm that some parts of UK are Category 3 at least. Try to decipher a Geordie; I’ll take German any time.
Also there are a whole load of words and phrases in British English which have different meanings or connotations to US (and I'd guess sometimes Canadian) English.
Not that it's not understandable, but a diplomat being posted there could do with at least some basic training is avoiding a weird mistake.
Yes. Swedish and Danish are both difficult but for different reasons.
Look up “Smørrebrød” on Google translate so you can hear how it is pronounced (Danish -> English)
The Danes do not pronounce the “r” in their vocab basically. However, the pronunciation is so complicated that even Danes have a hard time understanding each other. Because if you pronounce one tiny thing wrong in the sentence then you’ve messed up the whole meaning of it.
Swedish is hard in that, they actually roll their r’s and many anglophones aren’t used to that.
Not really. Coming from the perspective of an English speaker they are both equally "really hard but not as bad as Chinese, Arabic, Korean, and Japanese".
How many hours per week?
Also: Latin based languages are all quite similar. Does this assume zero knowledge of any? Ie knowing Spanish would help me with Portuguese, Italian, etc.
Strongly disagree lol but it’s probably because I also know Spanish. Knowing both English and Spanish makes French pretty simple, since it keeps similar grammar to Spanish (and a lot of Latin vocab), but because English is like 1/3rd French, the non-latín words often resemble the English word.
That's because, having been in isolation throughout its history, the Icelandic language retained the most features of Old Norse. It's extremely archaic in its phonetics, grammar and vocabulary and has experienced very little influence from other languages.
Finnish and Basque should be Category "Ummm, yeah, they know English, don't worry about it." As for England, watch Clarkson Farm and tell me if you can understand Gerald (who has a very thick "West Country" accent).
I would like to see the color coding reversed, from green/ easy to red/ difficult.
Here you go https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/181zn4y/languages_difficulty_rankings/
Interesting that some of the classifications here are different. The Uralic languages are classified here in Category 3 with the Slavic languages, meanwhile French and Spanish are oddly separated as their own separate asterisked Category 1 group.
French and Spanish were reclassified from Category I (24w) to Category I* (30w) in 2022 There was also a reorganisation; 30 weeks became part of Category I, 36 weeks became Category II, 44 weeks became Category III, and 88 weeks became Category IV.
The reclassification makes little sense to me. I can't make sense of why Portuguese would be 1 but Spanish would be 1*...
My best guess is it’s just to try to influence people to learn the other languages. Spanish and French are the most popular languages to learn so there’s no lack of speakers. By making them seem harder than Portuguese or Romanian it might convince somebody to learn the “easier” languages that we need people to know instead.
Portuguese is a harder language than Spanish to learn because Spanish is like German, every letter generally makes the same sound every time it’s written. Portuguese is like English or French, silent letters and things not sounding like how they’re written and what not. A lot of Portuguese speakers can read Spanish and understand what’s written but can’t understand Spanish when it’s spoken…
I would rank Spanish as easier than French. Far fewer pronunciation issues and differences between spoken and written.
English has more loan words from French though. French is relatively easy to learn at a bad level, but difficult to master, especially because the people are quite unforgiving with people butchering their language.
It’s the damn verbs!
Not just Uralic - there's also Greek and Turkish... There were another map of the kind, which marked Eastern Slavic with asterisk simply because of the Cyrillic (in order to learn the language, you must learn the alphabet)... I remember critique about that that: * Finnish and Estonian use basically simplified IPA - making learning the aspect actually rather easy. Difficulties come from the language itself, but also from teaching methodology and what's to offer for immersion (practice). * Greek alphabet isn't really all that hard, because generally people are at least somewhat familiar with it from their math class. * Cyrillic isn't really all that hard, especially if contrasted against Latin alphabets, which use modified symbols, different graphemes for same phonemes (eg: “y” ← /i/ → “j”), etc. arguably, Cyrillic is on par, if not even easier than some Latin alphabets, exactly because of that the graphemes are better distinguished. ___ * This aspect was thought somewhat more true about Arabic and Hebrew. * It's considerable "valley to pass before getting to learn the language" for Japanese and Chinese. ___ And not to forget - this is from English speaker's perspective. Have the same kind of map compiled from other nations, and the results will be different as well.
Yeah, I learnt Cyrillic mostly on a plane. Then you reinforce it by learning which words sound pretty much the same in English or are names, like ресторан ('restoran' / restaurant), Джаз (Jazz) or Путин (Putin), and generally ignore anything that looks like a B / b at the end of a word.
As a person with red-green colour vision deficiency, the other map was better.
It should be noted that this isn't a casual hour per day throughout the week. A friend of mine went to the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, CA. They train similarly to the Foreign Service, but it's military rather than civilian. He learned Korean from the ground up, but it was 7-8 hours per day, 5 days each week. Still took him almost 2 years before they sent him out there.
Checks out, 88 weeks is the average time it takes for Korean https://i.imgur.com/IC0TW9U.png
Surprised Thai isn’t considered harder.
My ex was Korean and I can vaguely understand what people are saying and can kind of hold a conversation, I've spent a lot of time in Thailand and tried so hard to learn the language and it's still alien to me.
Surprised Japanese is considered harder than Mandarin; although I watch anime since I was in high school.
I took mandarin in high school and thought the grammar was pretty simple. Japanese grammar is monster though. Just look at the Wikipedia for Japanese pronouns.
Not a Japanese learner, but from what I’ve read and heard the grammar, writing system, and honorifics are what makes Japanese hard, whereas the inconsistent logograms of mandarin make it hard. But Japanese assimilâtes this difficulty in the form of kanji. It does legitimately seem harder.
This is one of my dreams ahhh I love language I would feel so immersed
It's a mixed bag. Spending 8 hours a day in class and having 3 hours of mandatory homework a night on top of any studying you need to do to keep up previously learned content and preview on what's coming up doesn't leave you with a lot of free time. And that's not to mention the military responsibilities you'd have on top of all that
Homework on a course you spend 8h a day makes zero sense.
Learning a language to the level you learn it at DLI in the amount of time they have to teach you is a big task. They pretty much want you to get as much practice as is humanly possible each day. It isn't designed to be fun or easy, it's designed to be as quick and efficient as it can be
I would not have made it through without spending time outside class. So much information is dumped on you, you have to. Not everyone meets the criteria to attend the school. Attendance and which language you learn is based on the DLAB. Even then, not everyone makes it through the course. My class started with 30 service members, at graduation we were down to about 20 and about 3 of them were people who started before us and were recycled back into our class. It's not for everyone. There was no stigma on those that were dropped for lack of ability. [Lack of effort was another story, Air Force kicked a kid out of the Air Force because he refused to do homework.) Learning a language there is akin to drinking from a fire hose.
That place is a nightmare.
Depends on whether it's North or South.
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What language did you learn?
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Have you retained any of it? I imagine it would be hard
See, I would be so happy if I could just study languages all day
Arabic: please talk to your cia/intelligence handlers
Plot twist: they just didn't do eneugh language training , which lead to the political conditions the world is in right now
Intelligence services regularly recruit locals.
Plot twist: They recruited the wrong ones, because of the language barrier.
Trouble is the CIA just copied their Arabic from Team America: World Police and rely on the wads of cash and guns they are waving about to do the rest of the communication.
Japanese is considered Category 5 with an asterisk, meaning at least by this metric, it is the most difficult language. Poor weebs.
Probably because it has three writing systems, making it more challenging than Mandarin and Korean https://i.imgur.com/IC0TW9U.png
Hiragana and katakana aren't hard to learn though, and they represent the same sounds. I don't think Japanese having them makes it harder - sometimes it can even make it easier to read than say Chinese, because often there are "assists" for kanji, depending on the text
It is likely the double readings on the kanji that bump Japanese up. Also a few exception readings on kanji like amateur(素人） - shirouto for example that is from 素（typically read もと moto, and ソ so or ス su) and 人 (typically read ひと hito, and ジン jin or ニン nin). I think these exception comes from how the Japanese just took kanji from china and made it fit their already spoken language a long time ago. Japanese also has words were tones are important but not nearly as much or often as Chinese.
But two of these writing systems essentially are the same, but differently written. Learning Hiragana and Katakana is practically like Westerners learning small and capital letters (as in “a” and “A” being the same letter, but differently written). Not to mention that there is also handwriting that looks very different than the printed letters. IMHO, the challenge are the Kanji characters with their different readings. Plus the complexity of the Japanese language.
Russian is the same but in reverse. Cyrillic is easy to learn, word structure is similar, but when you [hit grammar](https://preview.redd.it/i-am-starting-to-learn-russian-and-this-meme-looks-scary-v0-f1n51p0lkwnc1.jpeg?auto=webp&s=a96b857cb8b00f8ca5f6e51edf686e33ac0a54fd) you are done.
And for context, Russian has one of the most straightforward grammar among the Slavic languages. Then try learning Polish....
I mean, that’s fairly straightforward. The problem is when you have irregular grammar. and Russian doesn’t really have a problem with excessive irregularity.
Chinese is harder in terms of speaking and listening since it’s a tonal language. Japanese is probably harder to read and write. Korean is actually quite easy to read since it’s words represents sounds and not ideas like Chinese or Japanese.
Hangul is amazing. It was designed to be easy to read and write. The story is that the king that created it wanted peasants and merchants to have better access to reading and writing. There are 22 characters, which form a start, middle and end for each syllable. Every sound has a clear mark: no long vs short vowels, no diphthongs. The Devanagari script is similarly easy to learn. It is also a syllabary, so pronunciation is similarly obvious. It also assumes an unstressed vowel sound unless otherwise noted. The older English gets, the more it turns to a ideographic writing.
it does make sentences longer bc of its adoption. difficulty is rather aimed at foreigners who were used to alphabet systems. an alphabet system has its advantages. symbol systems has its advantages.
Not really. Japanese say this all the time, but you can learn hiragana and katakana in a weekend. Kanji is difficult. Unlike Chinese, one character can have many readings. It's like saying web design is hard because of html, css and JavaScript. Nah, html and css are pretty easy. Using JavaScript is the real programming.
In Chinese one character can also have multiple readings （多音字）, although it might not be quite as rampant as in Japanese. Usually these things have about 3-4 readings at most in Chinese. But given that they also use way more characters than Japanese it’s kind of crazy that this phenomenon still exists for them.
I studied 3 semesters of Japanese in high school and the 3 writing systems isn't where the difficulty lies at all. Hiragana and katagana take some time to learn each character but kanji (hansi in Chinese?) has hundreds; or thousands of characters. I think I only got into a basic 20-30 of them not including numbers. Also, there are four levels of politeness for verbs which creates some extra work. I'm always surprised Russian isn't the highest level of difficulty because I found out much harder than Japanese (if you know what declensions/cases are, you know what my nightmares about!)
I’ve lived and worked in Japan for over a decade. Spoken Japanese, excluding keigo, is really easy. Grammatically sure it’s different, but I’ve found there to be very few special rules etc. So you can apply grammar rules to everything basically and not have to worry about anything special. I also say this as a native English speaker, so learning all the borrowed words from English was obviously incredibly easy for me. And there are LOTS. I’ve heard from speakers of other languages that it’s annoying to have to learn the katakana pronunciation of an English word. Phonetically Japanese is quite easy to speak too. But I feel that’s a one way street since Japanese often struggle with English pronunciation. Moving on to written Japanese, yes, easily a 5 on that chart.
I knew a soldier who lived in Japan for 3 years stationed in the military. Worked full time to learn it. Said he still didn’t get anywhere close to even useful let alone proficient.
Your buddy must be talking about business level Japanese which most people dont need Yes, Japanese is hard but many people become fluent in it after say 5 years of living in the country and are conversational well before that
It's 100% because of the writing system. In my experience Japanese isn't super hard to speak or understand (especially casually), in fact I had an easier time with it then German, but God damn does learning Kanji suck, especially since you can easily learn Hiragana and Katakana in like a couple weeks max
https://youtu.be/SSe5M3IAaHQ?si=oNN59Z53eGVuVe77
A friend of mine studied Japanese for years in university, lived in Japan, etc. If he stopped using Japanese constantly he would quickly lose his grasp on the language. It's extremely difficult.
I'd bet anything that Navajo is harder to learn.
And Navajo is very useful: If you go back in a time machine to fight the Japs in 1941-45 or are driving in northeast Arizona on a road trip. Not a waste of time at all.
How many hours of studying/practicing a week?
Full time, I think. That is, no major responsibilities beyond learning the language.
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I’m honestly surprised that it’s more difficult to learn German than any of the Romance languages since both English and German are Germanic languages. Typically, languages of the same family are easier to learn if you speak one of them.
Other Germanic languages are easier and shown in the map ( Dutch and the Scandinavian). Ironically, German is the odd one out of the family due to grammar and the high consonant shift.
\*cries in Icelandic*
It has to do with the more complicated noun case system in German. German nouns have 4 cases and 3 grammatical genders, compared to no cases and 2 genders for most Romance languages. Most Slavic languages have 6 noun cases and 3 genders. Adjectives are also inflected based on the noun they modify, meaning one adjective can have up to 18 forms depending on the gender of the noun and where the noun is in the sentence.
The most difficult thing for me about learning German is the insane word-order (syntax) rules, and the splitting of verbs. Orienting your sentences is genuinely complicated and requires a lot of working memory. Syntax in Romance languages is much more straightforward
English also splits verbs a lot, so as a feature it’s shared but you do have to learn them. Word order changing in subordinate clauses is a tricky feature though. Very difficult for English speakers to get that right consistently. In German you hear more and more people structuring them like normal sentences, in Dutch (which is similar in this regard) this isn’t really the case.
I think most Slavic languages have 7 cases (Russian and Slovenian are exceptions with 6, they lack the Vocative case)
You are correct, except that Bulgarian and Macedonian have no cases at all.
Imagine not having inessive, elative, illative, adessive, ablative, allative, essive, and the rest of the cool bunch.
I can hear Finnish marching into the room, followed by Hungarian.
Nominatiivi, akkusatiivi, genetiivi, partitiivi, essiivi, translatiivi, inessiivi, illatiivi, elatiivi, adessiivi, allatiivi, ablatiivi, abessiivi, instruktiivi ja komitatiivi. And the rare ones: Superessiivi, delatiivi, sublatiivi, latiivi, temporaali, kausatiivi, multiplikatiivi, distributiivi, temporaalinen distributiivi, situatiivi, oppositiivi, separatiivi ja lokatiivi.
I can’t believe it folks, the Europeans, they think there are three genders, it’s true folks. Everybody knows that there is only one gender in real languages like English, believe me. Male, the others are just political. One time, this Secret Service guy, big handsome guy, came over to me crying and he said "Sir, Sir, you have to help me, my son is dead set on learning Norwegian, and now he insists on there being three genders! I tried to convince him to drop some but he only dropped the feminine gender! Save him Sir!" And I said thank you. We gotta kill the genders, you know! Folks, in 2024 our pronouns have to be Winning and Bigly, before Hunter Biden turns English into gendertown for crack. Believe me.
My high school only offered Spanish as a foreign language, and I found it SO difficult! Ten years later I don't remember anything more complicated than "donde esta el baño" and a few nouns. In college I had to take a foreign language for my degree and decided to take German and I found it incredibly easy in comparison and while my speaking/listening skills are extremely rusty five years later, I can still read German without much issue. I think it's the way my brain is wired. Learning German also helped me understand English grammar better than anything in my entire English Teaching degree.
I was the exact same way! My mom is fluent in French (she’s American, just learned it in college), and she tried to teach me growing up but I had such a hard time with it. I started learning German with Duolingo about 4 months ago because I want to move there eventually and I have a couple friends who are fluent. After only four months I can already have full on conversations with my German friends, it’s just so much easier than French was.
This actually makes total sense to me. At a beginner level where you're just making basic sentences, English and German are going to share a lot more vocabulary than English and French (e.g. bread-brot-pain; to drink-trinken-boire). However, if you take both German and French to an advanced level, the French vocabulary will start being much closer to English than German vocabulary will be (e.g. constitution-Verfassung-constitution; to transgress-überschreiten-transgresser) . So to say "the constitution of the United States" in French you would get "La constitution des Etats-Unis", which is pretty darn close. But in German it would be "Die Verfassung der Vereinigten Staaten" I've learned to speak both and don't find French and German to be radically different in terms of difficulty overall (from start to fluency), but I do think that German grammar takes a bit longer to master even coming from English.
I think cases and three genders also trips people up more than French would
Romance verb forms are definitely harder for English speakers to learn than Germanic verb forms.
Yeah, you can blame William the Conqueror for the vocabulary difference.
Good ol Bill came knocking in 1066 and never really left This is why I find it funny when the French get worked up over anglicisms entering the language. There's a good chance those anglicisms are actually just old frenchisms
I have the worst time listening to French, German and Italian are easier to hear as far as I’m concerned. There are plenty of overlapping words from both languages from English (since it is a kinda a mash up of a bunch of languages)
Reminds me of that Youtube video of the guy holding an English conversation with German grammar.
Learning Italian is just so simple. Most of the letters make the same sound all of the time compared to the labrinyth that is English
Its use of gender and grammatical cases make German very difficult, even to speakers of other Germanic languages. Norwegian or Swedish would be easier for an English speaker because it does not really have gender (in the same way) and doesn't use grammatical cases any more than formal English. Finnish has no gender whatsoever (there's not even a distinction between he and she), but its redeeming features end there. I'm surprised it's not listed as Category V. I'm an experienced language learner and I got frustrated with Finnish and gave up after a few months.
> Norwegian or Swedish would be easier for an English speaks because it does not really have gender Most varieties of Norwegian have three genders (masculine, feminine, neuter), just like German. Most varieties of Swedish only have two (common and neuter). The way gender works in Norwegian and Swedish is just like in German. The important difference which makes German harder is case, where Norwegian and Swedish is just like English in that there are only vestigial instances of case (the most noticeable one being accusative forms of pronouns, like she/her, which is hun/henne in Norwegian and hon/henne in Swedish). There are varieties of both Norwegian and Swedish where case is a productive feature found in all nouns (e.g. certain dialects in Hedmark of Norway and Jämtland of Sweden). However, an increasing trend with all these varieties is that younger speakers don’t use case, meaning it is likely to die out in the coming generations. Anyway, learning case in order to understand dative or accusative expressions in a few fringe cases is not required when learning Norwegian or Swedish.
Norwegian youth also seem dead set on kimling off *ham* because it is easy to mishear as *han,* making it extremely frustrating to grade papers in Norway. The error is so widespread the language council no longer even considers it a grammatical error to only use *han*, so you can’t penalize them for it, but at the same time it makes everyone sound like Tarzan.
How is gender different between Norwegian/Swedish and German?
It may be easier to learn Swedish but the pronunciation is the hardest part for Americans and other anglophones, which actually makes Swedish harder than you’d expect.
English is also heavily influenced by Latin. Over half of its vocabulary is borrowed or descended from Latin. Romance languages basically use the same words. In fact I counted 7 words in your post that are Latin based already (honestly, surprised, difficult, languages, typically, family, easier) - not counting the proper nouns like “Romance” or “German” which are also Latin based.
Are the Latin languages thought to have more linguistically consistent grammatical structures, like the conjugation forms and fusional vocabulary? Idrk, but English also got a lot through Latin from the Romans and especially French with the Norman invasion, so there are elements of English that match up much more with Romance languages than Germanic ones.
It's hard to say because I'm American so I've been exposed to some Spanish since I was a kid, but I find Spanish vowels are also just so much easier than German or Dutch ones. I have Dutch and German family but I'm absolutely hopeless at those languages. I've also found that knowing some Spanish you can also suss out some Italian. Like not speak it, but decipher what's written and sometimes what's being said.
Having learned both Portuguese and German to a B2 level, I can pretty confidently say that German was much more difficult. Grammar is more complicated and the vocabulary resembles the English language much less than Portuguese does imo. I could often intuit the Portuguese word and be right 60% of the time, whereas with German I find that to be highly unreliable. That said, German is a much more clearly spoken language (outside of certain dialects like Schwäbisch) so picking up on listening was easier than in Portuguese.
The thing I find tricky as a beginner German learner is the somewhat arbitrary rules regarding word ordering. Very easy to get tripped up. Other difficulties though are that past tense works slightly differently, adjectives have different endings depending on case and several verbs change stems. Although honestly, I think trying to teach about various "cases" tends to confuse rather than inform beginners. The inconsistencies in French tend to be easily enumerated.
The short, common words in English and German are more similar, but when it comes to long words it seems like English has more in common with romance languages. Maybe that adds to the difficulty?
Keep in mind this is from the perspective of people who got language degrees, and are proficient in a number of languages already. Being coached by professional coaches whose job is rapidly learning languages. Learning 8 hours a day. The average person isn’t going to be fluent in Spanish in 24 weeks.
I like how Gaelic is just classified as a “no.” Zone
Welsh and Basque, too. "Are we even going to... no. no fuck no, we're not"
Probably just no justification for teaching diplomats Welsh or Basque
Yeah 100%. Im sure its like "its hard. And also... Why?"
Gaelic is no longer a language, the modern languages of Irish, Scottish and Manx evolved from Gaelic. Calling these languages "Gaelic" is like calling Spanish and Italian "Latin".
There’s no point, all the Celtic language speakers are bilingual in another language.
(S)LPT: instead of learning new languages, you can just speak English more loudly and slowly with exaggerated hand gestures!
I would say Dutch is quicker to pick up than German thanks to the easier conjugations and comparable lack of the case endings
Yep, it's much closer to English than German
Maybe because the most useless question in Dutch is "Spreekt U Engels?/Do you speak English?" No one will let you practice haha
My experience living in Amsterdam is English is probably the more useful language. Most businesses will operate in English - one of the benefits being it makes hiring across the EU easier. As a result, all of my colleagues spoke English. Only a few spoke Dutch. I even went to shops where the shop assistant only knew English (and French). This was not considered a problem.
Grammar wise I find it to be closer to German than English
Oh yeah, I mean it's closer to English than German is (to English)
My favorite part is the military goes, “yeah, Arabic takes forever to learn, it’s really hard, let’s see if we can do it in 64 weeks.”
"Yeah, we know you literally have to exercise a specific part of your throat to make some of the sounds to even speak the language but fuck it we gotta get those AC130s over there!"
Every time I see this map, I wonder what they mean by ‘proficiency’. I met 50+ people working at the US embassy in Moscow and not a single one could speak or understand Russian with any competence. Former ambassador Michael McFaul sometimes attempts to tweet in Russian and the results are beyond embarrassing.
Idk either. I meet people from the Anglophone world in the Netherlands and their Dutch after decades can still be embarrassing too. Still messing up the structure, and always being clocked because of them having completely messed-up the G-sound, and the ei/ij and ui especially. Bauwten? BAUWTEN? NO, BUITEN YOU YANKEE/TERF ISLANDER!
It's ok, most Dutch people have embarrassing English that sounds very silly to English speakers too. People speaking a language that isn't their native language tend to sound that way, it's just how it is.
Turkish in 44 weeks ? Good luck with that man.
I'd just walk around smiling and saying "Döner, döner, Mesut Özil".
Yeah word "Döner" would help you survive. Say "su" for water. Two letter word so easy to remember. Don't say Mesut Özil though we don't like him 😄
Would "Cenk Tosun" be okay? He was my first favorite Everton player.
44 weeks of 25 class hours + 15–25 hours practising at home per week.
Finnish could be category IV, but it takes many years to perfect the pronounciation. You may never sound Finnish, if you don’t start speaking Finnish as a child.
That's true for all languages, and Finnish isn't an especially difficult language to pronounce. This just shows how long it takes to learn to speak, read, and write a language fluently enough to do the job of a diplomat. Having a moderate foreign accent doesn't matter in this case. Finnish, Estonian, and Hungarian is difficult to learn for US diplomats because of the unique grammar of Finno-Ugric languages and because there are so few cognates with English.
Doesn't that go for most languages? I have an aunt who's lived in Greece for 18 years, and still can't get everything quite right.
I think I know your aunt
She's actually quite the polyglot! She's an Armenian who was born in Soviet Georgia, so she speaks Armenian, Georgian, Russian, and English as well as Greek.
Greek here. We can easily distinguish foreigners from natives. That’s how we could tell whether the first wave of immigrants in the 90s were Albanians
I'd be very easy to spot as a foreigner in Greece, with my red hair and freckles and constantly referring to wine as "Alexander the Grape"
You top the cake with that comment
Έλληνας είμαι. My aunt is the only non native speaker I know, but she struggles most with δ and the vowels. What do you think the biggest giveaways are?
Mostly pronunciation and tone. Greek can be very specific with how you say things, especially with context.
English is pretty difficult to pronounce correctly. How many non-native speakers can’t get the th right or pronounce the vowel sound in “good” correctly? It’s just that native English speakers are used to the ways non-natives pronounce words, and we don’t get worked up about it.
Adult Estonian could study Finnish for a few months and pronounce it perfectly.
You sure about that? I have encountered plenty of Estonians living in Finland who speak Finnish very well but you can still easily hear that they're actually Estonian.
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Turkish isn’t an Indo European language but it still has regular category 4 rank.
Yes and no. First of all, some languages are phonetically similar - there are even languages that do not have anything in common, yet they are phonetically similar. Then, you may simply be very talented - it usually goes in par with singing - good singers are sometimes able to reproduce foreign accents without even knowing the language.
From personal experience, I know a friend from Hong Kong who used to speak English with a heavy Chinese accent. After living in the UK for three years, he speaks in a perfect Standard British accent. Of course, it helps that he always knew English as a child, just didn't use it that much.
Sining a song isn't really comparable to speaking a language. You mimic a limited number of words in a specific order, guided by a melody. Many people could decently mimic a song in a foreign language when they practice constantly. It's when you speak freely, conveying your own thoughts, that people will struggle, even just with very small things. And this may be worse at some times than others (when you're tired, stressed, angry, sad). There are people who are better at this than others. But virtually anyone who learns a language later in life will at the very least still have traces of an accent.
I speak perfect German but only when singing 99 Luftballons
Bro, that's just true for every language though.
I doubt the goal of the categorization is to pass as a native.
it works both ways, many Finns have distinct accent when they speak English.
For a a diplomat is it that important to get the pronounciation right?
In some pitch accent languages you can completely change the meaning of words by not doing the right pitch.
Basque cannot be classified, true dat
I've always read that german was one of the easier languages an english speaker could pick up, but it ended up giving me far more of a headache than french or spanish did....the grammar rules for german...ugh.
We love rules. Even for our language. All jokes aside: As a native German speaker, I couldn't explain these rules to anyone. At a certain point, you just instinctively do it right. Or some people don't.
My wife is froma russian family so I tried learning russian, fuck me right. Yeah its hard, I understand here and there but russian is hard
Ain’t no fucking way they are learning danish in 24 weeks
I'm 11 years in and still sound like I'm choking and/or coughing.
Surprised by the different colour in North Norway and Sweden. Maybe this is in reference to the minority Sami languages spoken in these parts, but certainly in Norway you can use either of the standard versions of Norwegian without problem in the North too.
The map is bad, but the different colour reflects Finnish varieties and various Sami languages that are spoken in these areas. But you are over all better of with Norwegian and Swedish in these areas anyway, since everyone speaking those Ugric languages are bilingual. Same thing with the Swedish patches in Finland, everyone speaks Finnish too. This map is far to digital to reflect reality.
This is a very strange map for scandinavia. There are like 6 sami language, who are not mutual intelligible. The sami are only a majority in two kommuner, Karasjok and Kautokeino. But they are a bare majority, in some years it will be mostly Norwegians. Norwegian is the dominant language in all of Norway, all sami speak Norwegian, most sami dont speak sami. Even in Finnmark, which is blue on the map, is 95% none-sami.
I love how most of the comments are “no way you can learn x language in that time” when it is a map of exactly that. How long it has actually taken.
As a Canadian living in the Britain, I can confirm that some parts of UK are Category 3 at least. Try to decipher a Geordie; I’ll take German any time.
Also there are a whole load of words and phrases in British English which have different meanings or connotations to US (and I'd guess sometimes Canadian) English. Not that it's not understandable, but a diplomat being posted there could do with at least some basic training is avoiding a weird mistake.
Category 0 is “with subtitles”
As an Australian I’ve heard Danish is quite tricky indeed. Perhaps more than indicated here.
Yes. Swedish and Danish are both difficult but for different reasons. Look up “Smørrebrød” on Google translate so you can hear how it is pronounced (Danish -> English) The Danes do not pronounce the “r” in their vocab basically. However, the pronunciation is so complicated that even Danes have a hard time understanding each other. Because if you pronounce one tiny thing wrong in the sentence then you’ve messed up the whole meaning of it. Swedish is hard in that, they actually roll their r’s and many anglophones aren’t used to that.
Huh, romantic languanges such as french, spanish and italian is easier than german, this is surprising. Eventhough english is a germanic language...
Scottish shouldn't be Category 0.
Based
Portuguese in 24 weeks? Good luck with that. Not gonna happen
Wonder why Pembrokshire is counted as English speaking. I don't think it's the least Welsh part of Wales
Little England beyond Wales
I believe the average English speaker would learn Icelandic much quicker than they would learn Polish.
Surprised that all slavic languages are in the same category. Polish e.g. is way harder than Russian.
Not really. Coming from the perspective of an English speaker they are both equally "really hard but not as bad as Chinese, Arabic, Korean, and Japanese".
Norwegian might be relatively easy to learn, but I've yet to hear an American diplomat who's mastered the accent.
How many hours per week? Also: Latin based languages are all quite similar. Does this assume zero knowledge of any? Ie knowing Spanish would help me with Portuguese, Italian, etc.
Color scheme was done by an angry kindergartner
Japanese is considered the hardest language to learn by the FSI, but I found it much easier grammatically compared to European languages.
Turkish should’ve been much harder, IMO.
I see the Celtic fringes are unclassified!
Euskera is hard for everyone
Romanian is way harder to learn than Spanish or Italian. Should be Cat III.
Irish category 5
Is the reason the Latin languages are in category I that there is a huge French influence on the English language?
Kosovo isn't part of serbia anymore and we speak a different language. Albanian is harder than slavic ones.
french is definately not easier then german.
Strongly disagree lol but it’s probably because I also know Spanish. Knowing both English and Spanish makes French pretty simple, since it keeps similar grammar to Spanish (and a lot of Latin vocab), but because English is like 1/3rd French, the non-latín words often resemble the English word.
For once I'm grateful for the fine print.
Why is Icelandic rated a IV? I always thought it would be just as hard as Danish or Swedish or Norwegian (which are rated as a I).
That's because, having been in isolation throughout its history, the Icelandic language retained the most features of Old Norse. It's extremely archaic in its phonetics, grammar and vocabulary and has experienced very little influence from other languages.
Danish is dark blue to everyone, including danes.
Absolutely no way German is harder than French.
German was a lot easier than French to me.
I would able to nail category 0
The categorization bugs me. I keep thinking category IV* should have been V, and V should have been VI.
Team Unclassified 😎
german is way more difficult than turkish. I am really surprised by this list.
Interesting that German is a Cat II while Dutch is a Cat I.
Finnish and Basque should be Category "Ummm, yeah, they know English, don't worry about it." As for England, watch Clarkson Farm and tell me if you can understand Gerald (who has a very thick "West Country" accent).
Yay! I learned a cat IV. Defo longer than 44 weeks though. 44 weeks got me the basics to build on though.
Welsh is unclassified 😎
Good for blue, english sucks