I think you have to specify how well a language needs to be learned before it counts as well. English is difficult in some ways most notably its huge vocabulary so it takes a long time to learn just the various word meanings and some native speakers are even limited in that regard. However, English is fairly simple to speak in its simplest forms. A foreign speaker can string various words together based on what they know and make all kings of grammar mistakes and still be perfectly well understood.
I can’t find anything that contradicts the idea that the Uralic languages are really a single family. I’m no expert on this matter though, so you might want to ask someone who is. Interestingly, several things I just found in searching say that the Uralic family was actually understood earlier than the Indo-European family.
I’d imagine that any language would be simple to speak in its simplest forms.
This is true to an extent, but it’s certainly possible to mangle English badly enough that one cannot be understood by others. It’s also possible to make a lot of grammar mistakes in languages other than English and still have your meaning understood.
As I recall from my two years of high school Latin, there are six cases that you must know, and the verb usually comes at the end of the sentence. It was hard for me, but then I didn’t study much. Oddly enough, the year after my 2nd year of Latin I went from being a C- English student to an A+ student. Honestly, it was like a lightbulb went on in my head and I seemed to instantly understand English grammar structure.
There is a lot of memorization in learning any language. It’s ‘easier’ to go from one Romance (or Latin) language to another because of some similarities, and because of the English cognates.
I actually studied Latin in college – I know it was hard for me! I was asking because it’s my frame of reference in this case.
The only other language I’ve studied was Japanese, which was also very difficult but, in that case, at least partly due to me being brutally lazy.
I believe it is well established that Finnish and Hungarian are related. They are both Uralic languages, as has been said. However, the thing is that they are still not very close. It’s hard to give a good comparison, but you can imagine that they are about as close as English and Russian, two Indo-European languages.
They only languages that are anywhere close to Hungarian are some obscure languages spoken in Siberia, as you said. To continue the comparison, they would be about is close as English and German.
According to a very nice popular linguistics book I read (but can’t remember the name of) languages tend to accumulate “rococo” over time: irregularities, ideosynchratic usages, shades of meaning. Countering this is a tendancy to loose complexity when the populations absorb non-native speakers. Thus the hardest languages to learn (or fully master) would be those spoken by groups that had been isolated for long periods. And the easiest would be first-generation creoles.
If you look at the Ethnologue link Wendell provided, the Uralic stock (extended “family”) are listed in nine groups. This may very well be the char author’s distaste for the sort of seven-level infrasubfamly outlines that have groups like Southwestern East Backendonowhereic. It’s my understanding that the Uralic stock splits neatly into two or three subgroups: Finnic and Ugric, with Samoyedic either considered an outlying Finnic subfamily or a third subfamily. Finnic in this sense is the first five (or six) groups, split into two groups, distinguished by letters, comprising Finnic as shown in Ethnologue and Sami (more distant from theothers than Estonian and Finnish are from each other) on the one hand, and the other groups, spoken in republiks in southeast European Russia, on the other. Ugric is the last three, with Hungarian alone in West Ugric and Khanty and Mansi comprising East Ugric. So even though it’s part of a recognized family, it’s still pretty isolated.
It may be true at some general level, but I’ve seen several studies showing Danish children learn Danish slower than children in other countries learn their own languages. The one I recall was one sponsered by the Nordic council which mainly focused on inter-Scandinavian language skills, but which also looked at language development in school children.
I couldn’t find a reference to it, but here’s an article about a Danish study showing Danish toddlers trailing their European peers in learning new words:
OK. I wasn’t sure if that language family was one that was created because of geographic proximity (at least for the original speakers) rather than actual linguistic similarity.
Just an anecdote. I’m American and my previous wife was Thai. Before our daughter was born, an older lady that taught ESL advised us to speak only our native languages to our daughter.
It worked VERY well. There was a period when she thought all women spoke Thai and another period when she thought all brown people spoke Thai and all white people spoke English but those only lasted a few weeks.
Now she speaks Thai like a native of central Thailand and English like someone from Missouri.
There was no hesitation at all learning both languages and (unlike the Thai that I learned as an adult) her language skills seem to be permanent.
Regards
Testy
My linguistics professor said languages never become simpler - they merely exchange one form of senseless complexity for another.
Regards,
Shodan
Technically, there are seven cases, but two of them are only rarely used, and are very similar to more common ones anyway. And there are five different declensions of nouns (three commonly-used), each of which has a different set of endings. Plus singular and plural for each of those. So you need to learn somewhere between 30 and 70 noun endings. Which isn’t as hard as it sounds, and in practice, you can completely ignore the 4th and 5th declensions (even if you manage to find a word in one of them, you could fake it by pretending it’s 1st or 2nd, and still be understood). Really, I’d say that the verb tenses are harder.
How hard is it to learn Esperanto? Presumably a designed language would optimize the tradeoff of richness vs. difficulty.
It’s easier than French or Japanese. 
In two years of somewhat distracted part-time studying, which included email beginner’s exercises, classroom time, reading, meeting people, and online practice, I was able to go from not knowing any Esperanto to speaking it well enough to go to Europe and for a week in Helsinki speak only Esperanto. Trust me… I did not learn French that fast, even as a kid.
Mind you, if, as a kid, I’d had the kind of opportunities in French as I had in Esperanto, I would have picked it up more quickly and remembered more of it than I did. I was picking up Japanese relatively quickly, though, but that was in a much more intensive environment (total immersion).
A friend started learning Esperanto at the same time as I did, and he was fluent in six months. He had the advantage though, of being a student on an off-term and not having as many distractions… and also of being one of the smartest people I have ever met… he picked up Bulgarian a while later, just in passing, when he met his girlfriend.
You’re just talking about morphology. This is stuff any kid can master with a little determination. That is not what makes a language difficult.
Word order is highly relevant. Latin is difficult for English speakers to learn precisely because word order is so flexible, especially in highly subordinated constructions. It usually takes quite a bit of time for native English speakers to get a good feel for this.
Latin is also highly elliptical and doesn’t necessarily have a lot of signposts and lubricants. Latin authors tend to ask quite a lot of the reader, certainly more so than their Greek counterparts. Greek gets easier the more practice you have, while in my experience, Latin gets harder. This is aside from the large lexicon and healthy dose of idiom, which would be problems in any language.
Oh, and both for classical Latin/ Greek, and Esperanto, there are cases of children* learning it as first language.
- Obviuosly not many children, because it requires parents with a high enough level of competence to say everything in that language to the child, for at least 6 years… but some people were determined and well-spoken enough.
I had Latin in school, and I think because it’s taught as dead language** unlike all other languages it creates the impression of being much more difficult than French or Spanish.
** Clubs where people talk Latin for fun are not widespread enough or of interest to schoolchildren struggling with it, compared to a holiday in Spain or a french exchange student.
Oh, and both for classical Latin/ Greek, and Esperanto, there are cases of children* learning it as first language.
- Obviuosly not many children, because it requires parents with a high enough level of competence to say everything in that language to the child, for at least 6 years… but some people were determined and well-spoken enough.
I had Latin in school, and I think because it’s taught as dead language** unlike all other languages it creates the impression of being much more difficult than French or Spanish.
** Clubs where people talk Latin for fun are not widespread enough or of interest to schoolchildren struggling with it, compared to a holiday in Spain or a french exchange student.