Language rating...?

I wonder whether the Defense Language Institute in Monterey* has determined the appropriate number of hours required to bring students to a certain level of proficiency based on native English speakers. I know they get students from around the world, but perhaps their enrollment consists mainly of native English speakers.

* See the link in Shatin's first post.

Poorly written first sentence...sorry.

Deborah,

As far as I know, those proficiency levels were for native English speakers, in fact highly motivated diplomats / military personnel who need to learn speak a new language. As others have pointed out, obviously there's no way to have a universal scale applicable to all nationalites.

Despite what many people think, English is quite difficult to learn. It is the most difficult European language to learn to READ. Children in Britain, America and other English-speaking countries take longer to learn to read that children from countries that have other languages, and English-speaking countries have higher rates of dyslexia than other countries -

"Despite being the world's lingua franca, English is the most difficult European language to learn to read. Children learning other languages master the basic elements of literacy within a year, but British kids take two-and-a-half years to reach the same point.
In the most extensive cross-national study ever, Philip Seymour of Dundee University and his team compared the reading abilities of children in 15 European countries. They found that those learning Romance languages such as Italian and French progressed faster than those learning a Germanic language such as German and English. "Children do seem to find English particularly complex and problematic though," says Seymour.

The team focused on the earliest phase of learning to read. They tested the children's ability to match letters to sounds, their capacity to recognise familiar written words, and their ability to work out new words from combinations of familiar syllables.

Seymour's findings might explain why more people are diagnosed as being dyslexic in English-speaking counties than elsewhere.

In languages where sounds simply match letters, some symptoms just would not show up, says Maggie Snowling, a dyslexia expert at the University of York. The condition would be more difficult to diagnose in children who speak these languages, though subtle symptoms such as impaired verbal short-term memory would remain. "People might be struggling, but no one would notice," she says.

Consonant clusters

The Germanic languages are tricky because many words contain clusters of consonants. The word "sprint", for example, is difficult because the letter p is sandwiched between two other consonants, making the p sound difficult to learn.

Another feature of English that makes it difficult is the complex relationship between letters and their sounds.

In Finnish, which Seymour found to be the easiest European language to learn to read, the relationship between a letter and its sound is fixed. However, in English a letter's sound often depends on its context within the word. For example, the letter c can sound soft (as in receive) or hard (as in cat). Many words like "yacht" don't seem to follow any logic at all.

Historical accident

However, the things that make English difficult to read might have contributed to Britain's rich literary tradition. Words like "sign" and "bomb" are difficult because of their silent letters, but these hint at relationships with other words. The connection with words like "signature" and "bombard" is obvious.

Mark Pagel, an expert on language diversity at the University of Reading, acknowledges the irony that despite being the international lingua franca, English is the most difficult to learn. The dominance of English has more to do with historical accident than any innate superiority of the language, he says.

"People who speak English happen to have been the ones that were economically and politically dominant in recent history. Those forces greatly outweigh any small difficulties in language acquisition." "

15:30 04 September 01

By James Randerson

English spelling does indeed have a lot of irregularities but the fact is that a lot of rules are pretty steadfast and really the most horrendously spelled words are actually some of the relatively few but most commonly used words anyway. I'm not gonna get into details but a lot of basic English spelling rules work pretty consistently thruout, altho salient examples of strange spelling definitely do exist. Don't get me wrong, in a perfect world I think English spelling should be reformed, but ever since I learned the complexities of English phonology of various English dialects, I've realized just how far we are from creating a new orthography suitable for everyone (or even a considerable majority).

Adam - I agree with your article that English being the most difficult European language to learn. My mother's native tongue is Macedonian. She is also fluent in Greek and Romanian. Of course, she learnt such languages in her youth and could gain fluency rapidly. She moved to Australia in her early 30's and of course was required to learn English. She went to English classes but to this day (some 30 years later), struggles with grammar, spelling and construction. I know being in your 30's would hinder somewhat your ability to learn a new language compared to being a child learning a language but surely her struggles must be attributed to the difficulties of learning English, especially since she was able to pick up the other languages rapidly.

I really can't understand people who claim that English is the hardest language to learn. I just can't agree with that, since it seems extremely easy to me. Well, I have never learnt any other foreign languages, but when I take a quick look at other languages' grammar, it seems pretty simple. Also, compared to my native language, English grammar is very easy.

And as for the spelling, even though it is not consistent, English is not the only language with silent letters and it's not the only language where the same sound can be spelt or the same letter pronounced in more than one way.

I agree with Sanja. Although attaining perfect proficiency in any language may take years or even never happen, basic (or bad) English is very easy. Such is not the case of basic German, Dutch or Polish. English orthography is not very difficult (at least for a Francophone). The vowel system is original.

<<English orthography is not very difficult (at least for a Francophone)>>

GREG:

We try to keep it simple for you Francophones! Then it meets your ability.... Keep smiling! :-)

Heh, as to me, as a native English speaker, German seems just like a more case-heavy version of English, with grammatical gender, adjective-noun agreement, SOV with verb-second word order, more agglutinative word formation, more haphazard plural formation, post-Second Germanic Consonant Shift phonology, and far, far less Romance vocabulary. I don't see why that would make such a difference between learning English and learning German, provided one actually remembers the genders and plurals for individual words, as most of the other differences aren't that big of a matter unto themselves, besides that it would be harder for a native French-speaker, since there is far less Romance-based vocabulary which would already be familiar. Even determiner and adjective inflection in German aren't that bad, once you get used to them. And likewise goes for Dutch, except that Dutch isn't nearly as case-heavy as standard Hochdeutsch, in practice, and even standard Hochdeutsch really isn't that case-heavy when compared with the "old" Indo-European languages.

Oh, and Dutch plural-formation is also far more regular than that German plural-formation, which I forgot to mention above.

Well, Travis, I don't know for others. To me, learning English was a thousand time easier than German. As for Dutch, I find the spelling rules more difficult than both English and German.

<<As for Dutch, I find the spelling rules more difficult than both English and German.>>

Hmm...I'm a native English speaker and I find Dutch spelling to be easier than English or German.

From what I've looked at Dutch spelling, it is rather simple and straightforward in general, and easily resolves the problem of having many more vowel phonemes than vowel letters without having to resort to using diacritics, besides using the diaeresis for disambiguation, using "een" and "één" for "a" and "one" respectively, and using other diacritics to separate homophonic words at times. It does have its irregularities, though, but those are rather incidental, and are not systematic, unlike those in English orthography. Hence why I used it partially as the basis of the English orthography scheme I've been playing around with lately, of course with many modifications.

On the other hand, I'm far more familiar with German orthography myself than with Dutch orthography, but besides the irregularities which exist in Dutch orthography, Dutch orthography seems to be far more cleanly designed as a whole than German orthography, which seems more ad hoc to me than it. There are some aspects of Dutch orthography, though, which I would have designed differently myself, though, such as using "oe" for /u/, and "u" for /Y/ (I think; it may be /y/), and using "ij" (which is used for historical reasons, being linked to historical /i:/) rather than just "ei" for /eI/ or /EI/, but those are another story.