Wikibooks talk:Language Learning Difficulty for English Speakers

The alleged source has different information

I checked the website from the State Department, and they do have a table similar to this one, but there are many differences, the classification is different, some languages don't appear, others appear with different names, is a mess.

I could link you to the website with the correct information and a color coded table that shows the inconsistencies BUT wikipedia doesn't allow me to save my edit with links to other websites

This list is really stupid. And is not accurate. I am a native/bi lingual speaker of English, and I have learnt most of these languages in less time than projected. What gets me is how you can compare that Mongolian is as difficult to learn as Russian or Icelandic? Get out of here. I am a huge language nerd and I had to give up on Mongolian a few times, even with many resources such as books, software, internet, and mongolian friends. Then Japanese is considered hard? I am in a japanese class in USA now and it seems to me that many of the students in the class, who don't speak anything else but English, have an easy time with it. And how can you put French on Category I? Or other Romance languages? I don't have a solution to fix this list, I just offer to delete this rediculous Category of difficulty for langauges for English Speakers, but native English speakers aren't the only ones who use the English wikibooks you know. --Girdi 17:49, 16 September 2007 (UTC)

Actually, I think French is a really easy language. As a matter of fact, even though I'm a native English speaker, I think French is actually easier than German, despite the fact that English and German are more closely related to each other, so I don't understand why you're surprised about the fact that French is in Category I. Anyway, about Japanese, how could you find that easy, even if you are bilingual in an unrelated language (as I am)? Sure, spoken Japanese may be easy, but what about written Japanese? A Japanese learner has to learn all of the Hiragana and Katakana characters, as well as thousands of Kanji symbols. On top of all of this, there's also the very difficult politeness system, too. How could all that NOT be difficult? I must admit, I haven't even tried to learn Japanese because I'm far too busy to be able to learn all of that stuff, but I fail to see how learning all of that could be easy. Runningfridgesrule (talk) 21:01, 20 March 2008 (UTC)

I don't think you can really rank languages like this. Especially JUST by similarity. Perhaps instead have each language's difficulties examined in detail, and with other lists of things like, similarity, vocabulary size, pronunciation, complexity, etc. For some people high vocabulary is a problem, for others it is pronunciation. French and Japanese were exceedingly difficult for me, for example, because of all the conjugation. In 2 years of self study and high school classes respectively I still can't put a sentence together. Two weeks of Chinese self-study and I can communicate fairly well, online at least. So this really is a useless page. (By the way, the list doesn't seem to distinguish between Mandarin and Cantonese, both of which could be called "Chinese"--Cantonese is way harder for English speakers than Mandarin is.)--76.20.29.191 (talk) 14:23, 24 August 2010 (UTC)

As a native Cantonese speaker, I agree with you in that Mandarin is easier than Cantonese because: Cantonese has nine tones as opposed to Mandarin's four, and that the grammar of speaking and writing are completely different. Kayau ( talk | email | contribs ) 14:23, 24 August 2010 (UTC)

Agreement with above comment

As a teacher of English to students as a second language I have to agree with the above comments. I've never heard of this list before and never heard of Foreign Service Institute which certainly isn't a highly known body of foreign languages. This list seems to aim to compare totally different languages and add an arbitary number of hours for learning to these languages. No language is necessarily difficult - it depends on the individual, the exposure to the language, your ability at learning and learning languages and attributes of the languages like grammar complexities, pronunciation and alphabet. This kind of list is not helpful. Xania ^talk 00:28, 8 November 2007 (UTC)

I don't understand why it is so difficult for people here to understand what this list is: given a group of native English speakers with language aptitude, how many hours on average would it take to obtain level 3 proficiency as measured by the FSI in the courses that it offers? Since the FSI trains US diplomats, wouldn't it make sense that they know what they are talking about? Just because you have never heard of the FSI means nothing. All these people babbling about motivation, attitude, etc are missing the point. 160.83.32.14 (talk) 18:24, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

In theory it seems good. In practice, a few of us find the rankings given very strange. Indonesian, with extremely simple grammar, the same alphabet, spelling that's about about 98% phonetic and mostly simple pronunciation with less phonemes than English, is listed as harder than Spanish, French and other conjugated European languages. That's completely counter to my experience and I've never met anyone with experience of Indonesian who thought it was harder than any other language. --Chriswaterguy (talk) 08:12, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

surely a government agency teaching cadres of people is a rather more relevant datapoint than the personal experience of an anonymous commenter on the Internet? Verifiable sources should count for something on wikipedia. And I honestly believe them re Indonesian because of the vocabulary familiarity in romance languages, and conquering that is by far a greater time sink than a quite modest flexion system of romance languages. 89.164.23.10 (discuss) 22:59, 2 January 2025 (UTC)

I find the rankings strange as well; while we may think they are unrealistic, they are empirical, having been compiled by a language school, and they are the only broad-sample study by a language instruction body I know of. I would love to see better results, and I would really like to see results that give the learning time of various languages by related languages (I would like to know how long it takes Hindi second language speakers to learn Panjabi, for example); if anybody finds such results, they should post them, make a new page, and re-title this page to indicate that it only contains FSI data. Until we have other data to put here (and I have googled heavily in English, German, and French to find some, to no avail), I say leave the page as it is. -- mrbenjones (talk)17:57, 2 Feb 2010 (UTC)

In Disagreement with Deletion Request

I think this webpage should be 're-titled' not deleted, as the FSI course guidelines were created for monolingual native English speakers from the USA, who wanted/needed/desired to learn another foreign language. Also, the hours required to learn a given foreign language, were assumed for an adult, not a person between 1-18 years old. You'll notice that the list of languages by difficulty on the FSI list, reflect the emphasis of the USA State Department bureaucratic needs.

Spoken Japanese is fairly easy to learn for a native English Speaker, I'll agree. However, the FSI takes into account the need to become fluent in writing as well. This is the area, where the Japanese Language becomes relatively more difficulty for a native English speaker, who lacks the background in Kanji (Chinese Characters). Of course, a native Chinese, will find written Japanese much much easier than English. Yes, Hiragana & Katakana, are taught in intro. Japanese, but those thousands Kanji and their various combinations are relatively difficult...especially compared to the say, the Vietnamese Written Language, for a native English language speaking person. Even native adult Chinese (Mandarin) speakers, have relative difficulty with their own native written language compared to other languages which have various types of alphabets: including Korean, Vietnamese, Thai, Arabic.

FSI has existed in it's present form since March 1947. There are two other bodies that have similar "Language Learning Difficulty for English Speakers":

• ACTFL (American Council of Teachers of Foreign Languages)
• ILR (US Government Interagency Language Roundtable)

Within the USA at least, both of these bodies are very important.

Outside of the USA, these bodies importance would vary a lot. For example, within the country of Vietnam, Australian English standards as 2nd language tend to take more importance, from what I gather. Why? Geography, Business, and Travel reasons is particular. Australian language businesses are meeting the huge demand, by Vietnamese to learn English. Plus, Australians generally find it cheap to live in Vietnam, and a nice environment with cheap beer & beautiful beaches.

In regards to this critique, " No language is necessarily difficult - it depends on the individual, the exposure to the language, your ability at learning and learning languages and attributes of the languages like grammar complexities, pronunciation and alphabet."

I would to this list:

1. the amount & depth of motivation to learn a given language
2. Pattern solving skills, knowledge.
3. a thick skin, when errors occur in the language learning process.

Now in regards to the claim that 'This list seems to aim to compare totally different languages and add an arbitrary number of hours for learning to these languages,' that is false on its face, as FSI did extensive testing before arriving at the estimated amount of time it would take to learn a given foreign language for a native English speaker.

In concluding, as this Wikibooks page, is about 'Language Learning Difficulty from a native English Speaker perspective'. I believe we should retain this webpage, but either "Re-title" the topic (e.g.: add the word "native" to the title), or add the rest of the native English speaking world perspective in this topic.

Meaning what does the United Kingdom, the Commonwealth, Ireland, Ghana, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Singapore and South Africa among others, rank the difficulty to learn another language as an adult/child?

I'm specifically looking for national professional associations/bodies who have done extensive research & have made published studies in this area of question. Not pseudo-knowledge, with hear-say.

Notice, the title of this article does not refer to previously 'bilingual', multi-lingual individuals/people, only to English Speakers (monolingual). —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.106.228.196 (discuss • contribs)

Well, first off, this is not the USA, so don't compare an organisations importance on how important it is in the USA. I also like to comment on your does not refer to previously bilingual comment. So you are saying only native speakers of English can use this wiki? Well, I am kinda offended by that since I am more or less bilingual in English. Sometimes my Icelandic helps me with learning languages like say Latin, Norwegian, or Danish, and sometimes my English helps me learning languages such as Spanish and Irish. So to say that this refers to English speakers only, perhaps we should make other pages saying Language difficulty for Icelandic speakers? for German speakers? for Russian speakers?, because I am sure there are many people on the English wikibooks whose native language is not English.

This organisation you speak of is just one of many I am sure. So to base a book and whole Wikibook-department on some organisation is just wrong. Maybe it is some organisation you love and think is correct. Well, let's take a look at English language for a second. As for me, I prefer writing in British English, I beleive it is the standard English of the world and is correct. But because this is an English wikibook, not based off of any organisation other than Wikimedia, I don't mind at all seeing American, Canadian, Australian, Irish, or New Zealandic English here. Thus basing a policy or a template off of a real life organisation that not everyone agrees with should have no home here on Wikibooks.

In defence of my comments, it does depend on the individual. Spoken Japanese, for me it is easy but for others it might not be. Spanish would be easy to an Italian-English speaker, but more difficult for a Russian-English speaker maybe. This list is absolutely wrong, if a real organisation really did in fact come up with this list, then I think that organisation is pointless and needs to just shut down. If someone who is interested in learning Korean for example, why would he want to know first before he learns it if it is difficult or not? And so what if he did, he would come to this page and see, wow Korean is really hard, and then give up on something he would have loved to accomplish, just because someone is saying Well, Korean is very difficult and will take lots of time, but Spanish here is easy, and so is Danish. (Which anyone who has studied Danish knows that it is not that easy as Norwegian, I mean come on!).

I think I just covered everything you said. But a Wikibook-Policy note to you. First you must sign your signature, even if you are an IP, for your comment. Second, do not remove the deletion notice from a page! The only time that will come down now is when we come to a decision, whether it be in favour or not, or an administrator takes it down. You might be blocked next time. --Girdi (talk) 14:13, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

What a bunch of blathering nonsense. Who cares how much you dislike the US and whether you think that British English is the "standard of the world" or is "correct" or that "this is not the USA" or any such childish (and linguistically silly) pouting? A European English teacher who has never heard of the Foreign Service Institute should spend more time with the linguists at the Council of Europe, who have dinner with their long-time FSI colleagues at every international conference.

What matters is empirical data. FSI has successfully trained thousands of native (and non-native) English speakers to FSI Level 3. These speakers are tested regularly by multiple native speakers of the target language, who decide which of several level descriptions seems the best match for the student's current proficiency level. When that student reaches a level 3, by consensus of the native judges, it is noted how many hours it took, what the student's background was, and other data.

There is no a priori judgment about language difficulty, just observations of average hours to reach level 3. The language data in the list is the result. The Council of Europe takes this data very seriously, because they have nothing comparable. Gathering data of this sort is harder in Europe because of the fragmentation of efforts and the fact that most Europeans who learn a new language learn one that they have been exposed to sporadically over many years. There are few who start from zero and run to FSI 3 (equivalent) in one straight line, so the data points are few and the variance is huge, making it almost useless except when Europeans are learning non-European languages.

Every serious second-language acquisition researcher, including those at FSI I'm sure, would love to see data based on the COE's "Common European Framework", which could in theory extend the FSI's data into a grid of difficulty from all (or many) L1-L2 language pairs. Such an effort would take decades, though (FSI's data is the result of decades of observation), so until such data is available you can either have your little anti-American tantrums and throw away great data, or grow up and take advantage of it. -- Frank Lin

I am most amused by your comments: you have totally disregarded most of what Girdi said and just gone on a tirade about American English v. British English. Grow up. He was saying that wikipedia is not purely American and it needs to cater universally to all English speakers.

I totally agree with Girdi: you cannot put a number of hours on various languages and assess their difficulties. One of my friends has been doing French and German for 6 years, same number of hours per week. He is almost fluent in French and is quite poor at German. Yes, this is anecdote, but it also shows how this system is flawed.

As for Japanese and Chinese, spoken chinese is one of the easiest languages to learn, having just 4000 potential words. Oh, yes, people who have never even tried to learn it will complain of how hard tones are, but this is a load of rubbish. The use of tones can be developed perfectly after just a week of lessons. In fact, the problem with Japanese and Chinese is their writing systems. But, therefore, putting Korean on the same level is totally wrong: they have just an alphabet.

Finally, I'd like to make my stance on this subject clear: I think it could be useful to be a rough guide, but I do not think every language should be stamped with it, as it makes it seem like it's the be all and end all.77.100.4.112 (talk) 18:10, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

The list is meant to show averages, with the exact numbers taken under unusual conditions that will not be replicated outside of intensive study programs. Some people just pick up some languages very fast, and some people just can't pick up a certain language at all, like your friend's difficulties with German. I find Arabic much harder than Japanese, but I'm sure someone reading this page thinks the reverse. It's more useful as a general guide to difficulty for monolingual English speakers, which presumably make up most of the readers of this page as it is written in English. I lay heavy emphasis on "monolingual." If you are learning a third language, you both have more experience of language learning in general and might have already learned a closely related language. Furthermore, this is a guide for native speakers of English. If this were a guide written for native speakers of Japanese, Korean would be listed as an easy language and Danish as hard or very hard. Arabs would find Hebrew easy. There is no such thing, to the best of my knowledge, as a list of languages by absolute difficulty, and such a list would be in any event completely useless to foreign language learners. I'd absolutely love to see more data and especially data on various L1-L2 pairs, but lacking such data this list is much better than gossip, rumors, and blog posts.

4000 potential words in spoken Mandarin? I think you meant "syllables". Words can be made up of more than one syllable, even in Chinese (and especially in Mandarin). By that standard, Japanese should be one of the world's easiest languages as it only has ~110 moras. Also, this list was compiled decades ago, when hanja (characters) were a mandatory subject of study and in use, so they had to be learned for Korean, alphabet or not. Korean hanja aren't as ridiculous as Japanese kanji, but on top of difficult pronunciation and Turkish-like grammar it's quite enough to place Korean in the "very difficult" class.

My personal experience suggests that the order of magnitude in the list is more or less correct. Japanese is requiring at least double the class time that Spanish required to get to a similar proficiency level, and Arabic is shaping up to require triple or quadruple the class time since it agrees with me less. I wouldn't discourage anyone who wants to learn these beautiful languages, but they should know going in that it will take more work than a language closer to English/written in Latin script, barring some special circumstance (e.g. heritage speaker, prior knowledge of an Altaic/Semitic language, prior proficiency with script), and be prepared for that. That's what this list is for, and no amount of complaining about how it doesn't take into account the altered difficulty of Ottoman Turkish for the English-Korean-Arabic-Urdu quadrilingual or how it was compiled by Americans rather than the proper guardians of the Queen's English (which, the last time I checked, had grammar so similar to the American dialect that users of both could understand each other, so speakers of it should have similar difficulty with exotic grammar) will render the list unfit for that purpose. 98.223.236.66 (talk) 01:54, 6 February 2010 (UTC)

How about based on language families?

How about just a list of the languages grouped by family (but only one or two levels deep). That would give an idea of how similar languages are without making crazily specific claims about difficulty? GalaxiaGuy (talk) 14:59, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

I also agree with Xania's comment. I have already started what you proposed GalaxiaGuy, have a look at Manx or Icelandic. I made a template below to navigate to languages in the same category. We should have more like Romance Languages, Germanic Languages, Slavic Languages, Indic Languages, Language Isolates, Altaic (Which exists but needs some renovation), African languages, (not including Afrikaans since that is a Germanic and European language, don't know whos idea was that to group Afrikaans under African languages), and so on. --Girdi (talk) 15:12, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

I don't like popularity contests but a list ordering the languages in terms of number of speakers would be more useful for Wikibooks readers. This way it would be easier to find Japanese, Portuguese and Spanish (all near the top of the list) as well as languages like Manx, Breton and Estonian (all nearer the bottom). Putting the languages into order would be difficult as people always disagree because of bilingualism, the difficulty of measuring one's ability and problems determining between a language and a dialect (Croatian, Bosnian, Serbian, for example). Xania ^talk 00:20, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

So can someone delete this rediculous page already and remove the Category templates? I will place a delete tab. --Girdi (talk) 22:22, 20 December 2007 (UTC)

A word about verifiability

You may think this page is total BS; that's fine. But you can't edit it on that basis. This is about the FSI's system, and must therefore reflect it accurately (regardless of whether it's right or wrong). If you want to have objections to it, please make them not just your own opinion, no matter how well-informed or correct it may be. This is basic WB:NPOV folks.

As a parallel, take a look through the arguments regarding AEDs (an index is here) in my project. Most if not all of the contributors agree that AEDs require no training to use, and that certification for that is ridiculous. But we can't put that in because the training organiations (who have the only opinions which matter) think that training is important. Well, that means that according to WB:NPOV and WB:OR, our hands are tied.

You might not like it, but these form the foundation of this project, and must be followed. I will be watching this page with interest in the future; please make an effort to find a compromise to this, as there is no consensus to delete this page.  – Mike.lifeguard | ^talk 13:52, 21 January 2008 (UTC)

Well its still not right to base other languages difficulties here on an American organisation, that I as a linguist, have never even heard of it. I suggest keep the page but don't place labels on other pages regarding language difficulty. Also, shouldn't this then be moved to Wikipedia? I can't see this as a "book". --88.149.117.47 (talk) 02:03, 24 May 2008 (UTC)

I'm amazed at these supposed "teachers" and "linguists" that haven't even heard of the FSI. If you spend any time at all interacting in language learning forums or communities, discussions about the FSI appear continually.

Maybe in the USA the FSI is respected and considered to be important but as I've said again and again it has no such respect internationally and we should not use a US government scale in Wikibooks.--ЗAНИA ^talk 12:19, 10 September 2011 (UTC)

I'm impressed

I'm impressed that this page is an almost verbatim quote out of a certain US government website. I think the only saving grace is that US law declares all federal government publications to be public domain.--75.17.119.118 (talk) 03:28, 24 February 2008 (UTC)

It is indeed public domain if it's created by US federal officers - good for the US government. Using that as a basis for a wiki is a great thing, and we should do it at every opportunity. --Chriswaterguy (talk) 08:17, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

The US federal officers must be presiding over a people with an uncanny nack for irregular plural forms, since Swedish fall in category I. Swedish was, allegedly invented by 8th century school teachers as a way to discipline very very naughty children, with the unfortunate effect that those very very naughty children fled overseas and founded the Viking nation, that subsequently ravaged the Early Medieval West, at least that is the most plausible reason for the complicated plural forms of Swedish. As far as I know, immigrants to Sweden that learnt Swedish after having learnt the simple and clear English, would certainly accept my theory right away (Bork Bork!). Rursus (talk) 16:39, 15 August 2009 (UTC)

Friendly debate

I disagree with some of the comments on this page, but defend the right of people to say it. I know some people haven't learnt how a wiki works (signing in, not removing a deletion notice without consensus) but we were all newbies once. Let's keep debating, in constructive way. --Chriswaterguy (talk) 08:20, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

Removal of my contribution re: Esperanto as a bridge language

Hi,

User:93.193.96.139 decided to delete a small contribution I made pointing out that Esperanto could be useful as a bridge language for some learners, particularly French language learners. I detailed my rationale for why my addition should be in the article on his talk page. Basically, I referenced http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto#Education and if anybody disputes the factuality of that article section, they should perhaps take it up on the discussion section of that particular article before disputing it on this one.

As such, I have undone his reversion, but feel free to comment here if you disagree with me.

I disagree with the idea of including Esperanto as a bridge language, mostly because I don't think we should push any language in the article. Esperanto in particular is problematic. If you want to treat Esperanto as any other language, you have to recognize that the FSI hasn't evaluated it, and it doesn't belong on the list as currently structured (though it fits in the title of the article), which it has in common with other languages with many more speakers such as Oriya, Hausa, Tok Pisin, and Malagasy.

If you want to recognize Esperanto as a special case, then you have to take into mind that it would be the only language on the list with a WP article on its shortcomings.[1] Choosing to learn Esperanto specifically, or any other international auxiliary language is inherently a political statement, in the way that choosing to learn no natural language is; you learn it because you want to speak with like-minded people: Esperantists.

I won't say that it doesn't belong in an article like this, I will say that it shouldn't be given any undue weight, which means that it doesn't belong in the header, and as the article is currently structured shouldn't be given consideration (inclusion of a non FSI-evaluated article) that other languages aren't. You could suggest a revision of the book. But I believe the FSI list is in fact what most people are looking for: an assessment of languages English speakers are likely to find most useful, and their difficulty, assessed by consistent standards. I might suggest creating additional pages to the book that go into research on second-language acquisition, and which could appropriately include Esperanto. I might do that myself, at some point. --Quintucket (discuss • contribs) 08:10, 23 December 2011 (UTC)

Good article--but difficulty is different from time needed.

I think this is a useful article summarizing data on the time needed for English speakers to attain a high level of proficiency in various languages. It is based on a well-known study done at the FSI many years ago, which is often referenced in articles in the field. My only suggestion is that references to "difficulty" be replaced with time needed. This study is only about time needed to reach that level of proficiency in an intensive program. "Difficulty" is a more complex term and could include such matters as amount of effort needed and the degree of ultimate attainment reached. Since the source study is only about time, I'd suggest sticking with what the study shows.

David108tx (discuss • contribs) 15:22, 2 April 2011 (UTC)

Mongolian

Is Mongolian really that hard? The website cited lists it as category II with an asterix. Why it jumped in difficulty on this website?

Good point. I've fixed this. Thanks for pointing out this error. – Adrignola discuss 13:05, 19 March 2012 (UTC)

Hate to burst your bubble, but German is much closer related to English than Italian. (English and German are both West Germanic languages)

They may be more closely related but that doesn't necessarily mean the language will be easier. German pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary can be an issue for those learning German compared with Italian.--ЗAНИA ^talk 11:44, 31 January 2013 (UTC)

Can we get rid of this?

I se that this has been brought up numerous times before, but this categorization system is inaccurate and completely unhelpful. It has even been removed from the website it was originally posted on. I am not going to nominate this page for deletion (and I know it already has been, closed as no consensus), as I see no reason to, but I do suggest that this system be ceased from use. I'm am posting this so the discussion can be brought up again. Liam987 16:58, 14 March 2013 (UTC)

A question...?

Just a question. Where would Yiddish be on this list? I don't care if this doesn't belong here, because nobody will notice this is here anyway. Shikku27316 (discuss • contribs) 01:16, 5 April 2013 (UTC)

Don't know for sure but my guess is that it would be either Cat 1 or Cat 2. Of a similar difficulty to German or Polish.--ЗAНИA ^talk 19:15, 6 April 2013 (UTC)

Okay, thank you for responding. I would assume it is Cat 1, because of being like German but simpler. Thanks. Shikku27316 (discuss • contribs) 02:37, 18 April 2013 (UTC)

Not the actual FSI list so not a credible reference source

This list is not credible. There are no specific reference sources cited other than the mention of the FSI, and many of the languages listed are not rated by the FSI or contained in its list. One of these is Irish, which I'm currently researching: it has been included here as a category II language but the FSI makes no reference to the Irish language anywhere.

==seconding this point. I saw the difficulty ranking from another page and came to see how it worked in wikibooks. I was surprised tho that this is not the actual FSI ranking, Russian is in category II for English speakers??? what. according to this list the only languages which are difficult for english speakers are sino-tibetan and mongolian or japonic. this needs to be revised at best. most slavic languages rank category III in the III category system. there's also a four category system and apparently now a V. this is a link to an FSI page http://www.effectivelanguagelearning.com/language-guide/language-difficulty