Language rating...?

Jonne   Saturday, April 09, 2005, 11:02 GMT
I heard somewhere that there are some sort of a language difficultness rating.. or something.. something with cats...?
Linguist   Saturday, April 09, 2005, 11:59 GMT
difficulty of a language depends on your native one, so even if such ratings exist, it isnt worth to see them
Jonne   Saturday, April 09, 2005, 12:39 GMT
Yes I know, but it'd just be interesting to see it.
Thomas   Saturday, April 09, 2005, 12:45 GMT
From a German native speaker's perpective:

Spanish - very easy
English - so so
French - a little bit more difficult than English
Finnish and Hungarian - hard
Korean - very hard
Japanese and Chinese - extremely difficult (especially Japanese writing system and Chinese tones)
Vytenis   Saturday, April 09, 2005, 15:27 GMT
We, Lithuanians, find English soooo difficult and German much easier. I don't know why - they are both Germanic languages and not at all similar to Lithuanian. I guess it's because German has been around for centuries and English is relatively new in this part of Europe...
Kirk   Saturday, April 09, 2005, 23:37 GMT
Yeah, it all depends on what language you speak natively, so it's impossible to create a scale that would apply to everyone. For me, a native English speaker, I've studied a few languages in classes:

Spanish: pretty easy. the grammar never seemed too hard for me, even tho Spanish is a Romance language--for some reason it seems to have some intuitive grammatical forms (for me as an English speaker) that other Romance languages don't have. Plus a lot of cognate words.

French: somewhat harder than Spanish, but still pretty easy because of similiarities with Spanish and some English vocabulary. I'm glad I learned Spanish first because it gave me the basis on which I could begin to understand French grammar...one fun realization...gender seems about 90% the same as in Spanish (with common exceptions like "el color/la couleur" or "la leche/le lait," for example), so even tho with some French words it's hard to tell the grammatical gender, I can usually just get away with thinking of what it is in Spanish and then use the French equivalent. Also a lot of cognate words.

Korean: difficult...I won't say very difficult because it doesn't have tones and it uses a phonetic alphabet, two things which give it a major advantage to learning as compared to other major Asian languages. It was nice to learn the alphabet in two days of class and then focus on everything else as compared to taking Japenese where learning writing is a long process (that never really ends with the importance of learning kanji). Words similar to English are few and far between, and are only relatively recent borrowings into the language in terms of modern technology and pop culture domains...hardly ever the expression of abstract concepts which so often have cognates in English and Romance languages, for example.
Deborah   Saturday, April 09, 2005, 23:56 GMT
Jon,

>> I heard somewhere that there are some sort of a language difficultness rating.. or something.. something with cats...? <<

Are you thinking of Computer-Adaptive Testing?
Deborah   Saturday, April 09, 2005, 23:59 GMT
Sorry...Jon --> Jonne
Deborah   Sunday, April 10, 2005, 00:26 GMT
Jonne,

Perhaps there's a set of criteria used to predict the difficulty a speaker of a given language will have learning various target languages. But I can't imagine there's a language difficulty rating that will give each target language the same difficulty rating no matter what the learner's native language is.
Shatin   Sunday, April 10, 2005, 08:51 GMT
I wonder if you're referring to this:

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~wbaxter/howhard.html
rich7   Sunday, April 10, 2005, 08:59 GMT
I've read in this very forum that Polish is one of the hardest to learn.
Sander   Sunday, April 10, 2005, 09:14 GMT
=>http://www-personal.umich.edu/~wbaxter/howhard.html<=

What?! 480 hours to learn level 2 dutch ?! Proposterous! There are people here who have been living here for 20 years and still don't speak a word Dutch....how could you learn even a few words in 480 hours..same with norwegian dannish.

What is level 2 then ? Saying your name and age ?
Jonne   Sunday, April 10, 2005, 09:32 GMT
Thanks.. I read somewhere that they rate them as 'cats'
anyway, for my name, you pronounce it yonneh.
Shatin   Sunday, April 10, 2005, 09:34 GMT
See following link for explanation of what various levels mean.

http://www.platiquemos-letstalk.com/About/Proficiency.htm
Sander   Sunday, April 10, 2005, 10:01 GMT
?!?!?!?!

Level one = Able to operate only in a very limited capacity.