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Arabic, Japanese, Chinese, and Korean
According to this site, the US military language school finds that it takes MUCH longer for students to get to a certain level of proficiency in these four languages.
We often read posts here about the difficulty of certain languages. For these folks, English is probably the native or first language, so please take that into consideration.
It isn't just the new way of writing, it's being almost at square one as far as vocabulary. There just aren't those multiple cognates for easy insertion in one's memory.
I almost hate to say this, but if you have a 'bad' memory, pick a language that is closer to your mother tongue.
Here's the address to type if you would like to see how 'difficult' other languages are deemed to be for students who probably began with English. It's at the bottom of the page.
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~wbaxter/howhard.html
He oído que los ingenieros del ejército estadounidense están tratando de desarrollar una manera de fabricar un agujero en el espacio-tiempo, lo cual permitiría que los soldados-traductores quedaran en "animación suspendida" durante un tiempo largo. Podrían llegar a dominar un idioma en sólo uno o dos minutos (para nosotros los observadores, por supuesto para ellos el tiempo transcurrido parecería mucho más largo, pues tendrían que aprender el idioma de la forma tradicional). ¿Qué les parece? Es un nuevo prodigio de la ciencia, aunque algunos digan que es una violación de la naturaleza. Será muy importante en las guerras futuras y en la lucha por la Antártida.
Oh no, you're having a rough go of it! Perhaps you shouldn't have done it in the first place! That was a stupid idea to learn this language. (Now looking to see how devoted you are.)
Plus, taking advantage of cognates in closely related languages is probably one reason why a lot of English speakers see a lot of "mistakes" regarding the usage of words like "to," "for," etc.
beneficii,
Are you adressing potential language learners? You are one of the most mysterious posters on this forum.
My original post was some data about the military language school in California. It's old data, but interesting.
Then, there is the, uh, humourous post above yours.
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I've been thinking about your philosophy to listen first, for hours, before speaking. Are you doing that with Japanese?
>>I almost hate to say this, but if you have a 'bad' memory, pick a language that is closer to your mother tongue.
But I've always been wondering how many of my compatriots managed to speak English, no matter how good or how bad.
So now, English and Chinese don't share a lot of cognates. That must lead to the same linguistic disadvantages to both Anglophones and the Chinese. I wonder, if any Chinese government could ever publish a Chinese FSI scale, whether it would took me 1320 hours to learn English.
Judging from my experience with English and German, I guess English would, rather, be in group 1.5 of Chinese FSI, and the major European ones approaching 2, while more morphologically complex, obscure ones with few relatives would be 3 or 4. Yet, I can't tell if Japanese and Korean are in group 1, because the Chinese still have to sweat a lot over Japanese/Korean grammar as much as what others do, except Kanji/Hanja.
Distance between languages is significant to me
For some reason, word order has never bothered me, but then I saw this sentence in Chinese 我有心（ ）病. ( Sorry, but I don't know how to input the ( ) in my word processor. ) The sentence was something like "I have heart problems"... Anyway, I was struck by how straightforward that sentence was. Chinese works in my operating system, lol.
I often wonder how many real hours it takes to learn a language. The Japanese proficiency test people think a student is ready to take the most advanced level of the test (JLPT) after 900 hours of study.
That would mean less than a year at 3 hours a day. I'm not sure if I believe that guess. I wonder if they used Chinese students or Korean students (when they still learned Chinese characters) as example students for deciding that.
Another interesting question is the next: if these languages are so difficult, they will never be important? or this factor is not so decisive?
That is an important question because in theory Chinese and Arabic are World languages, but they are very difficult from the Western point of view. And not only Western.
I think that a person from Morocco, Indonesia, Iran or Senegal think the same about Chinese written system
If that is true, only European languages will be really important: English, Spanish, French, etc.
>>Distance between languages is significant to me
For some reason, word order has never bothered me, but then I saw this sentence in Chinese 我有心（ ）病. ( Sorry, but I don't know how to input the ( ) in my word processor. ) The sentence was something like "I have heart problems"... Anyway, I was struck by how straightforward that sentence was. Chinese works in my operating system, lol.
There might be some philosophy about how peoples express their views on life using languages. The complexity of Chinese is exactly its simplicity. The Chinese are straightforward in terms of their choice of expressions (SVO, word order, topic-prominent, no inflections, [at present] no consonantal clusters), but "guanxi" could be very complicated and even bewildering for foreigners who aspire to do business with the Chinese.
>>That would mean less than a year at 3 hours a day. I'm not sure if I believe that guess. I wonder if they used Chinese students or Korean students (when they still learned Chinese characters) as example students for deciding that.
As I said, a Chinese FSI could be drastically different. If Japanese and Korean were to be in group 1, the time needed to reach fluency could be more than that for Anglophones to learn Germanic/Romance languages, because, after all, Chinese has NO sister languages that are national, established and with a cultural tradition, such that systematic learning in the FSI fashion could be possible. All the so-called dialects (which I assert to be all separate languages) just survive in the minds and brains of the Chinese, and with the dominance of Mandarin, only Cantonese survives with a passable written language. Theoretically, "I" can learn those "dialects" as quickly as how Anglophones learn Dutch/German or Francophones learn Italian/Spanish, but I hardly do anything about this without having relatives who speak them or at least a reliable source of learning materials - they are simply dying...
The sentence should be 我有心脏病。
While theoretically one could determine that certain Western languages were fundamentally easier for Chinese people to learn than English, the fact is that there are few textbooks in China, where I live, for other languages. English is easier for them to learn than others owing to the resources available. I know this is an irrelevant consideration. Spanish might be easier? But the r would be hard for Chinese to pronounce.
Anyway, the easiest languages for Mandarin speakers to learn are the other Sinitic languages, eg Shanghainese, Cantonese, Hakka, Hokkien, probably in that order. But: once again other considerations apply. People who have Hokkien grannies would probably not think it hard to learn...
But the Chinese way of learning won't ever work, until there are Chinese publishers who write courses like what the Americans, the British and the French, etc, have been doing. All they now would still do is to ask you to recite everything by heart. While I admit you must memorize, through different ways, to become well-rounded in language X, the way that has been "prescribed" by Chinese books has been very "hardcore". For some learners from other countries, it would be ridiculous/laughable to see books with mp3 that help "reciting (isolated) words". This is entirely unpedagogical and ... dumb.
Theoretically, Sinitic languages must be the easiest.
I think that out of the four, Arabic would be the hardest, at least for the average Westerner. The grammar is very complex, the pronunciation not easy, and the orthography not particulary easy either, especially in representing vowels. Plus what do you study--Modern Standard? There are several "dialects" (often mutually unintelligible), none of which matches Modern Standard.
Spoken Chinese and spoken Japanese are easier, especially if you have enough good materials in pinyin and romaji or kana. The grammar, particularly for Chinese, is much easier. Reading is another story, but learning to read 10 characters a day is not impossible, and will give you most of the characters you need in less than a year. (Writing will obviously take longer.)
Korean is probably harder than Japanese--similar grammar, but more difficult pronunciation. However, the writing system, hangul, is alphabetic and pretty straightforward, especially if you stay away from texts using Chinese characters.
None of the four have much vocabulary in common with Western languages (except for the thousands of words borrowed from English into Japanese and written in katakana). However, with Chinese, for example, once you learn enough characters, you are have potential understanding of thousands of words made from combinations of two or more characters.
The sentence should be 我有心脏病-DJ
Yes, that is correct.
There might be some philosophy about how peoples express their views on life using languages. The complexity of Chinese is exactly its simplicity. The Chinese are straightforward in terms of their choice of expressions (SVO, word order, topic-prominent, no inflections, [at present] no consonantal clusters), but "guanxi" could be very complicated and even bewildering for foreigners who aspire to do business with the Chinese.-Xie
What aspects of guanxi seem bewildering to foreigners in your opinion?
Carrier,
I know some people learn to speak without learning to write, but this seems too incomplete to me.
To me, Korean and Arabic have two things that could be challenging: The sounds and the dominant cultures associated with the languages. Perhaps that sounds ethnocentric, but I know very well that delving deeply in the language often involves cultural exchanges, sharing food, one's life, etc.
I think I can master the sounds, putting in the time to develop the relationships necessary to get the real words of a language may be another matter.
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