Ranking list of languages by learning difficulty?
Ranking list of languages by learning difficulty for native speakers of various languages?
Would you please rank the following languages (listed in a random order) from hardest to easiest & from the viewpoint of your own native language. & detailed information would be much appreciated.
French
Italian
Spanish
Portuguese
Romanian
German
Dutch
Swedish
Norwegian
Danish
Afrikaans
Russian
Greek (Modern)
Hebrew (Israel)
Persian
Turkish
Hungarian
Finnish
Thai
Vietnamese
Arabic
Mandarin
Japanese
Korean
Cantonese
Minnanese
NO SPAMS, Please! Thank you very much!
Well, I assume that you meant (from an English perspective).
In that case, the easiest languages to learn are the closest to English, therefore:
Latin Languages
-----------------
1-French
2-Italian
3-Iberian (Spanish and Portuguese)
Germanic Languages
---------------------
1-Dutch
2-German
3-Scandinavian (Danish, Swedish, and Norweigan)
Well, I assume that you meant ().
In that case, the easiest languages to learn are the closest to English,
Thank you for your reply, and actually I mean:
If you're an English speaker, then from an English perspective.
If you're a French speaker, then from a French perspective.
If you're a Russian speaker, then from a Russuan perspective.
If you're an Arabic speaker, then from an Arabic perspective.
It depends on which one you speak as your native language.
So, from different perspectives, the conclusion will vary from one another.
I agree. Those are seem like the easiest to me as well.
It depends also on how many languages you already know and which ones.
If you know a couple of Romance languages, it will seem like a piece of cake to pick up a few more of them, but it won't help you terribly with Japanese.
If you are familiar with tonal languages like Cantonese or Vietnamese, I would bet that Mandarin wouldn't seem so difficult to pronounce. I could be wrong, but that is my perception.
May I ask why you included Minnanese?
"Those are seem" lol. "Those languages seem like the easiest to me from my perspective as a native speaker of English."
K. T. : May I ask why you included Minnanese?
Because as far as I know, Minnanese belongs to Chinese languages, too, and usually it would be considered even more difficult and complicated than Mandarin and Cantonese. Minnanese is still spoken in some places of China.
Thank-you for your reply. There seem to be a number of Chinese languages. I spent some time reading a book largely detailing the peoples and languages of (mostly) Asia. I remember thinking about the huge numbers of speakers of languages that are largely unknown in the West (as if people only exist because we know of them and their language)...
Minnanese (Bân-Lâm-Gú), is absolutely the beginning of nightmare for all foreign learners, and also, it seems very difficult for Mandarin or Cantonese speakers, perhaps, just like learning Vulgar Latin, or Koine Greek, from the perspective of modern English speakers.
The American Defense Language Institute / Foreign Languages Center use the following scale. Seems pretty sensible and reliable:
Category I: Dutch, French, Italian, Portuguese, Scandinavian languages, Spanish
Category II: German, Romanian
Category III: Greek, Slavic languages, Turkish, Vietnamese (among others)
Category IV: Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean
I'm Russian
Easiest to hardest:
Eastern/Southern Slavic
Western Slavic, Romance, English
German
Asian
I am a native English speaker, also speak Spanish, Portuguese..no way is Polish or any other Slavic language easier to ME than Korean, but that's just me. Same for Vietnamese..yeah they use the 'Latin' alphabet..I am willing to bet most English or western IE speakers would have a much easier time learning Korean or Japanese than Vietnamese!
Hard vs. easy language lists are pretty pointless. Of course, Basque, probably should be at the top of most any list.
From easiest to hardest (I didn't put all, because a lot of them are unimportant)
1. Esperanto
2. Spanish
3. English
4. Italian
5. Portuguese
6. Franch
7. German
8. Russian
9. Arabic
10. Chinese
Galician
Portuguese
Italian
Frunch
Romanian
English
Dutch
Flemish
Afrikaans
From a Turkish person's point of view, from the easiest to the hardest, the list should be:
1-Azerbaijani
2-Turkmen, Kazakh, Uzbek, Kyrghyz and the other Turkic languages
3-Mongolian/Tungusic languages
4-Spanish/Portuguese
5-Italian
6-French
7-Romanian
8-Scandinavian languages
9-Dutch
10-German
11-Armenian
12-Arabic
13-Farsi
14-Bosnian
15-Albanian
16-Greek
17-Japanese
18-Russian
19-Chinese
20-Korean
21-Vietnamese
But the most difficult one is probably Basque, the language of Devil...