Difficult languages and easy languages, part 2

On March 4, 2017, I posted on "Difficult languages and easy languages".  The response was overwhelming — there were 151 comments.

First of all, I want to thank everyone who participated in this survey.  The large number of respondents who contributed their thoughtful appraisals means that the results do carry a certain degree of significance.

Considering the fact that tabulating the results was a rather daunting, time-consuming task, I was not able to post them as quickly as I had hoped.  The main reason that I was able to finish the work at all is simple:  although Cathay Pacific has wonderful service, they do not have Wi-Fi, at least not on the planes I flew to and from Hong Kong in late April of 2017.  Consequently, during the nearly 30 hours of my flights back and forth across the Pacific to review the Translation Department of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, I was able to concentrate on recording the figures on the pages of the survey I had printed out and brought with me.  Further delays since then were the result of the press of teaching and mentoring, writing blogs and newsletters and articles and books….  Finally, on Memorial Day, May 27, 2019, I was at last able to type up the results (the tabulations were almost lost when my backpack got soaked in a rainstorm two years ago; fortunately, the pages on which they were written were buried deep inside, so they were not destroyed — that would have been the obliteration of weeks of work).

I had originally stated that I wanted to limit the lists that people sent in to six languages so as to keep the project within manageable size.  I am grateful to everyone who sent in their ranked list of languages, from Easy to Difficulty, and resisted the temptation to go much beyond six languages.

I realize that this survey cannot possibly yield scientifically rigorous and reproducible results for the determination of easy and difficult languages.  There are many reasons why this is so.  For one thing, there are many variables, some of which are poorly defined.  What do we mean by "difficult" and "easy"?  Are we talking about written language or spoken language?  I had emphasized at the very beginning that I find spoken Mandarin to be quite easy (for me!) to learn, but written Chinese is extremely challenging.  A commenter on the o.p. said, "Written Japanese is not hard; it just needs a lot of memorization."  I don't know about others, but for me, who am always pressed for time, one of the definitions of "hard" with regard to language learning is "needs lots of (time for) memorization".

Then there's the problem of the order in which one studies a succession of languages.  Especially if they are somehow related, subsequently learned languages may be more readily acquired than the first foreign languages one learns.  The age at which one learns a second language is also relevant, since the capacity for learning a second language is greater the younger one is.  The environment in which one learns a second language (total immersion? academic / classroom setting?) and the pedagogy applied (emphasis on vocabulary? grammar? memorization? communicative competence?) are also operative.

Another factor that should be taken into account are the differential learning abilities of various individuals with regard to different aspects of language.

In the following list, the two numbers are:  average score (level of difficulty, with "1" being easiest and "6" being most difficult) / total votes cast for a particular language).

Here we go:

EASY

Haitian Creole  1 / 2

Malayalam  1 / 2

Afrikaans  1 / 1

Maori  1 / 1

Papiamento  1 / 1

Swahili  1 / 1

Tagalog  1 / 1

Tetun  1 / 1

Tok Pisin  1 / 1

Esperanto  1.25 / 8

Malay / Indonesian  1.3 / 3

Catalan  1.5 / 4

Spanish  1.7 / 61

Dutch  1.81 / 11

Italian  1.93 / 16

Hindi-Urdu  2 / 3

Klingon  2 / 2

American Sign Language  2 / 1

Classical Nahuatl  2 / 1

Hawaiian  2 / 1

Lojban  2 / 1

Marathi  2 / 1

French  2.23 / 65

Nepali  2.3 / 3

English  2.45 / 24

Norwegian  2.5 / 4

German  3 / 64

Swedish  3 / 9

Portuguese  3 / 7

Danish  3 / 4

BCS (Bosnian / Croatian / Serbian)  3 / 2

Koine Greek  3 / 2

Albanian  3 / 1

Bantu  3 / 1

Chichewa  3 / 1

Dari (Tajik)  3 / 1

Farsi  3 / 1

Old Norse  3 / 1

Sinhala  3 / 1

Telugu  3 / 1

Yiddish  3 / 1

Latin  3.17 / 23

Mandarin (spoken)  3.5 / 25

Breton  3.5 / 2

Icelandic  3.5 / 2

Modern Greek  3.5 / 2

Korean  3.71 / 7

Hebrew  3.75 / 16

Welsh  3.75 / 4

Mongolian. 4 / 1

New Testament Greek  4 / 1

Pali  4 / 1

Persian  4 / 1

Tamil  4 / 1

Japanese  4.1 / 20

Irish  4.12 / 8

Russian  4.14 / 35

Cantonese (spoken)  4.25 / 4

Thai  4.33 / 3

Finnish  4.5 / 2

Scots  4.5 / 2

Ancient Greek  4.6 / 13

Polish  4.66 / 3

Arabic  4.69 / 13

Czech  4.75 / 4

Turkish  4.77 / 9

Georgian  5 / 3

Estonian  5 / 1

Old Javanese  5 / 1

Pashto  5 / 1

Sámi (northern)  5 / 1

Ubykh  5 / 1

Chinese (written)  5.11 / 9

Sanskrit  5.18 / 11

Old Irish  5.33 / 3

Hungarian  5.33 / 3

Vietnamese  5.83 / 6

Literary Sinitic  6 / 2

Navajo  6 / 2

Armenian  6 / 1

Burmese  6 / 1

chiShona  6 / 1

Crow (Plains)  6 / 1

Maltese  6 / 1

DIFFICULT

Compare our rankings with those of the  Foreign Service Institute (FSI) — it is remarkable how closely the two tally with each other:

"Language Difficulty Ranking":

* Languages preceded by asterisks are usually more difficult for native English speakers to learn than other languages in the same category. Category I: 23-24 weeks (575-600 hours) Languages closely related to English Afrikaans Danish Dutch French Italian Norwegian Portuguese Romanian Spanish Swedish Category II: 30 weeks (750 hours) Languages similar to English German Category III: 36 weeks (900 hours) Languages with linguistic and/or cultural differences from English Indonesian Malaysian Swahili Category IV: 44 weeks (1100 hours) Languages with significant linguistic and/or cultural differences from English Albanian Amharic Armenian Azerbaijani Bengali Bosnian Bulgarian Burmese Croatian Czech *Estonian *Finnish *Georgian Greek Hebrew Hindi *Hungarian Icelandic Khmer Lao Latvian Lithuanian Macedonian *Mongolian Nepali Pashto Persian (Dari, Farsi, Tajik) Polish Russian Serbian Sinhala Slovak Slovenian Tagalog *Thai Turkish Ukrainian Urdu Uzbek *Vietnamese Xhosa Zulu Category V: 88 weeks (2200 hours) Languages which are exceptionally difficult for native English speakers Arabic Cantonese (Chinese) Mandarin (Chinese) *Japanese Korean

The second commenter* to the FSI thread notes:  "Chinese isn’t as hard as people think it is and although the writing system IS a nightmare, the grammar couldn’t be any simpler."  I couldn't agree more.  If you ask me, "What's the easiest language you've ever learned?", I will immediately say "spoken Mandarin".  If you ask me, "What's the most difficult language you've ever tried to learn, I will answer without hesitation, "Literary Sinitic / Classical Chinese".  I will write a separate post to explain why that is so.

[*Their entire comment, though opinionated, is also insightful on languages such as Japanese, Italian, German, Turkish, and Arabic.]

It is noteworthy that most languages fall in a range of around 3, the midpoint on the scale of difficulty.  Also worth pointing out is that creoles consistently score among the easiest languages to learn.