What are the easiest / hardest foreign languages for an English speaker to learn?

Factual Questions
21

“Thousands” is only technically true. There are about 2000 in common, general use. 1000 more in common use for names, but from what I’ve seen of Japanese documents and applications most people ask for the phonetic version of your name along with the Kanji. So even a lot of Japanese people can’t easily read all the name characters in one go, much less write them. (Granted some of this is because the Kanji->reading mapping isn’t 1-1 or even wholly predictable)

It’s certainly not Chinese where estimates of how many characters you “need” vary wildly from 4k to 7k to one estimate I was told that seems a little high – 11k.

But generally speaking, I’d say you only really “know how to write” Japanese if you can reliably write about as well as a Japanese graduating high school senior is able to. Which generally means most of the 2000 Kanji, with maybe a few gaps for the less common ones.

This is, of course, ignoring issues of “true” fluency (sometimes things are arbitrarily written in Hiragana or Katakana for purely stylistic reasons, and recognizing when it’s appropriate to do so).

22

Yeah, I’ve always heard that Hungarian is the hardest Latin script language to learn for an English speaker. As someone who lived in that country for 5+ years, I have to agree. I can get by in Hungarian, but any European language, and I’d be practically fluent in that time period. (The Slavic languages are a bit of a cheat for me, though, as I grew up speaking Polish, so they all are pretty easy for me to pick up quickly.)

23

The reason Hungarian is so difficult is because there are almost no cognates with English words, so a great deal more time must be spend learning vocabulary, instead of falling back on a large numbers of words that can be remembered easily because they are so similar to English. I suspect a Norwegian speaker would find Portuguese just as difficult as Hungarian. To an English speaker, Finnish and Turkish would be difficult for the same reason. Vietnamese is also now a Latin script language, which would be very difficult, unless it has a lot of borrowed French words.

24

Interesting. It took me about 6 months to learn Hebrew at the age of 25 - full immersion though, not just book reading. It is one of the (IMO) easiest languages to learn. Small vocabulary, practically all roots are three-letter roots, very straightforward word formation… Maybe my knowing Russian helped, although Hebrew is nothing like Russian. You know, it is said that Jews don’t study Hebrew, they recall it.

25

What?

(No, he’s on second.)

26

In this vein I saw an article about vanishing native languages of Mexico, years ago in the L.A. Times. I can’t remember the language, but evidently there were only two speakers left–and they weren’t talking to each other!

27

It’s not just the lack of cognates; the Foreign Services Institute website listed above lists Indonesian, Malaysian, and Swahili, none of which are Indo-European languages, as requiring significantly less time for general proficiency than, say, Polish or Russian. Even Greek is listed as harder than those three languages, and English is filled with Greek cognates.

Rather, the problem is that Hungarian is about as far from English as you can get. It’s almost a language isolate. Its phonemic inventory contains several sounds not in English, and consonant and vowel length are phonemic. It exhibits vowel harmony. It has a pile of cases. Transitive verbs are marked for the definiteness of their objects. It’s agglutinating. And so on.

Vocabulary usually isn’t the sticking point in learning a new language; it’s usually the grammar, plus recognizing and reproducing spoken features that aren’t phonemic in one’s native language (aspiration, tone, pitch, vowel length, etc.). Memorizing a bunch of new words isn’t difficult, especially if one has months to learn a language.

28

I just looked it up and Hungarian has 18 (!!!) cases. Wow. And I thought Russian, with its 6 cases, was a bit difficult.

29

Remember that cognate means merely that the corresponding words in different languages evolved from a common ancestor in some ancestor language, and not necessarily that the words mean the same thing in the different languages today, or even look at all similar when written down. Depending on the languages involved, cognates can hinder more than help. When different, the meanings are usually related conceptually, but not of much help to beginners.

As an example, Herbst in German means “fall” or “autumn”, but the cognate relationship is with “harvest”.

Kumnat (sp. and diacriticals?) is Romanian for “cousin”, and quite befittingly a cognate of “cognate”.

30

Nope. Not for all practical purposes.

Agreed, with the caveat that this includes those you can only write with a word processor / computer / cell phone. I can probably only “write” a couple of hundred characters without looking them up now. Of course, many Japanese are also getting to be in the same boat.

31

There was an estimate in 2013 that there were at that point 288 languages (out of 7,106 total languages) that were classified as being nearly extinct. A language is called nearly extinct if no one except elderly people speak it even occasionally. It’s nearly impossible to get an exact count because one or two of those languages dies every month, and there’s generally nobody there to make a note of the death of the language. That doesn’t even count another 424 languages that are hardly ever spoken even by the elderly people and 203 that are sometimes counted as living languages although no one can really speak them anymore:

http://www.ethnologue.com/statistics/status

http://www.ethnologue.com/about/language-status

32

What about the Dutch language? English, Dutch and German are all West Germanic Languages and the Dutch grammar is much easier than the German grammar.

33

I don’t speak either, but it seems to my shallow study that Scottish is worse. Irish has had a more recent reform where words have been simplified (e.g. Gaedhilge > Gaeilge; Scottish Gàidhlig). It helps if you realize that these languages do not have a letter “H”. When you see an H, it means that the sound of the previous letter is altered, so e.g. “bh” might be a “v” sound as in Cobh. Once you understand the basics, things are rather regular. You might’ve advanced beyond this point though.

Since 2010, the official number is 2,136 kanji characters for normal fluency. Beyond that, many of them may be unknown to many Japanese and are e.g. for names.

I think of Japanese as being pretty easy to pick up the basics, at least so that you can have the language skills of a child. The more advanced subtleties are however very difficult and it’s not only kanji that is the problem.

34

Ayapaneco. Cracked actually did do this one Wikipedia claims that that story isn’t true (link).

Dutch pronunciation looks scary, but that isn’t something that’s necessary to actually learn it.

35

A word I learned because my mother is a linguist is “conversancy.” It’s a step down from “fluency.” Someone who is fluent in a second language is thoroughly competent, and may have an accent, but knows it well enough to become an interpreter after interpreter-specific training. It’s a very high standard. Conversancy is closer to what most people meet in a second language. You can hold a conversation in the language, but you may have a little difficulty with a large group discussion of a conversation at a noisy party where you miss some words, you may still be struggling with reading and writing, but most native speakers speak to you like anyone, and assume you catch all of what they say in casual conversation.

Just mentioning it, because conversant, rather than fluent, is what most people are in a second language.

Anyway, being able to talk to other people in your language that you are learning is an important factor in learning it. Russian people, IME, were always thrilled to meet Americans who were learning Russian, and were happy to speak Russian to them. Israel has Ulpans for newcomers, who are immersed in Hebrew, so even though most Israelis speak English, newcomers to Israel who go to Ulpans are still immersed.

French is an easy language to learn to read, but it’s hard, IME, to find people willing to speak French to new learners. for some reason, French people have a low tolerance for people who speak bad French. I have no idea why.

Americans, in spite of a reputation for xenophobia, generally have a high tolerance for the mistakes new learners make when speaking English, so foreigners in the US are pretty well-accepted as English speakers.

Deaf people can sometimes be judgmental of people just learning sign language. They may be suspicious of people’s motives. If they decide you are OK, though, they are willing to sign with you, and even to use ASL with you. If you’re not “OK” for some reason, they may sign English with you, rather than ASL, so you may never get exposed to much ASL.

36

Yeah, I would say the main difficulty is the grammar. The pronunciation isn’t all that bad, but the general structure of the language is just so different than English. My working Hungarian vocabulary is reasonable–certainly a couple thousand words. But damn if it still isn’t a bitch stringing them together correctly and with the right endings to form a sentence.

37

What on Earth could you even use 18 cases for? I imagine that some of them are only rarely used, like Latin’s vocative and locative, but still, I’m having a hard time even coming up with 18 different obscure corners. A different case for every preposition?

38

I hated Hebrew school. The kids were mean. I was on scholarship there because my dad was a mailman. Meanwhile they were daughters of doctors and lawyers and they never stopped reminding me of this fact. Refusing to learn Hebrew well was an act of rebellion on my part. I was hoping my mother would agree to let me leave if I got lousy grades in the subject. But I only got to leave when we moved from Queens to Brooklyn, making the commute essentially impossible. You really can’t force someone to do something they don’t want to do. The Hebrew I know is mostly of conversational interaction, religious services and popular songs. I am less rebellious today and I like speaking it but there is no one I personally know who does. So I am left only to teach the familiar songs and prayers to my daughters and that is about it.

My late mom was a fluent Yiddish speaker but I know nothing of that language. I wish I did as it would probably be helpful if I ever decided to learn German. My father is from a similar background but his parents made the conscious decision to speak English and only English.

39

Well, we weren’t taught of it as “cases” as in the Latin or Slavic sense. None of my Hungarian textbooks really mentions case at all. And I don’t know where the 18 number comes from, but I assume it’s counting all those particles that get added on to words in Hungarian (where we would use prepositions) as distinct cases. Rather than come up with examples myself, here is a good summary of the cases.

The endings for each case don’t really change much except for vowel harmony, so it’s not any more work, really, than memorizing prepositions and similar grammatical structures in English. So, in my opinion, it’s a lot less difficult than the Slavic case systems, where you may have up to seven case endings across three genders, and those cases are also used in many more types of grammatical situations than in Hungarian.

40

Here’s perhaps a better summary of Hungarian cases. There are 18 there, plus the “kind of/type of” ending, which doesn’t have a case name. Like I said, I personally never really thought of it as a case system, just tacking on words that would normally be prepositions and the such at the end of a word, instead of keeping it as a separate word. So, for example, in Hungarian the instrumental case is just the “-val/-vel” ending, which means “with.” In Polish, there is both a separate word for “with,” “z,” and an instrumental case ending you need to learn. Plus I forgot to mention that it’s not just seven cases across three genders in Polish (although you really don’t need the vocative much, so it’s more like six cases), there’s also two types of plural. Plus you have to decline both the adjectives and the nouns. It’s a royal pain in the ass. Hungarian doesn’t have that difficulty with its case system.