Something interesting I found today – a ranking of languages according to their difficulty for a native Japanese speaker. The list goes from levels 1 to 4, 1 being easiest and 4 being hardest:
- Swahili, Indonesian, Malaysian, Turkish, Korean
- Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Vietnamese, Chinese
- French, German, Greek, Czech, Thai, Hungarian
- Hindi, Urdu, Russian, Arabic, English
I’m surprised that Swahili is so easy, but Indonesian, Malaysian, Turkish and Korean are all either related to Japanese or share some vocabulary. The level two languages are European and Chinese, the latter of which, while sharing a writing system, is substantially different from Japanese.
The level three languages are all European except for Thai and Hungarian, both of which are very distantly related to Japanese. I’m surprised Thai is so far down the list, as it shares a similar geographic area, but perhaps there hasn’t been much crossover between the two. The level four languages are all utterly unrelated – Arabic is Semitic; Urdu, English, and Russian are all Indo-European and very structurally different from Japanese.
The Defense Language Institute’s ranking of languages according to difficulty for native English speakers goes like this:
- Afrikaans, Danish, French, Haitian-Creole, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish
- German, Hindi, Indonesian, Malay, Romanian/Moldavian, Urdu
- Albanian, Amharic, Armenian, Azeri, Bashkir, Belorussian, Bengali, Bulgarian, Cambodian, Czech, Estonian, Finnish, Georgian, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Kazahk, Laotian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Farsi, Polish, Russian, Serbian-Croation, Slovenian, Somalian, Tadzhik, Tagalog, Tatar, Thai, Turkish, Turkmen, Ukrainian, Uzbek, Vietnamese
- Arabic, Chinese (Mandarin and Cantonese), Japanese, Korean
Level one is compromised of cousins from the Indo-European family, and kissing cousins at that: Afrikaans, Dutch, French, etc, except for Swahili – what is it about Swahili that makes it so easy to learn?
The level two languages stay primarily within the same family (German is related to English, Hindi, Romanian, and Urdu are all Indo-European) but branches out now to some Asian tongues. The third level consists of more exotic relatives like Bulgarian, Farsi, Russian and Greek, but also includes a number of Asian languages, especially Central Asians like Uzbek and Kazahk from the former Soviet Union.
Level four has no related languages whatsoever – unless you count a few loanwords, Arabic has little in common with English, and Chinese, Japanese, and Korean are incredibly different.
Obviously, gentlemen and ladies, the choice is clear; the perfect language for inter-cultural relations is: Swahili!