The relative difficulty of languages

by Lode Van de Velde, June 2018​

There are numerous lists and speculations about "difficult languages", but basically most of it depends on how remote the target language is from the student's background. In this article, we will discuss which language characteristics determine the difficulty of languages.

Relative "difficulty" of languages
Chinese is often cited as an example of a "difficult language", probably because the articles are written for/by English natives. However, Chinese is not so difficult for a Japanese student, who is already familiar with a lot of the ideograms and part of the vocabulary, even if they don't belong to the same language family. (Japanese ideograms have also a Chinese pronunciation, the so-called 'on'-reading.)

Spanish is easier to learn for someone that lives near the Mexican border or who has had a Latin nanny than someone who lives close to Canada due to the exposure difference.

Complications in foreign languages
Here is a list of factors that make a language difficult to learn, add them up to make a "degree of difficulty" if you want to compare languages.
Depending on the language and the learner's personality, some factors may also be more important than others. Feel free to use +2 or +3 instead of +1 if you feel some factors to be a bigger obstacle than others.
If you know several languages already, you may already master some elements described below, it doesn't matter from which language you know them, it can only be helpful to you! E.g. if you've learnt Latin at school very well, cases should not be too much of a problem, unless there are a lot more of them.

• add +1 for a different alphabet or writing system (+2, +3 for greater complexity)
  If you're reading this, you probably know English, thus the Latin alphabet. Learning the Cyrillic or Greek alphabet is roughly a one-on-one conversion, with familiar elements in both, so add +1.
  Korean is phonetic as well, but quite a different system, add +2.
  ​Chinese is the most complex for someone that has nothing in common with it's writing system, add +3.
• add +2 (or +3) for a language of a different language family. Languages from different language families don't have any words in common, besides perhaps internationally spread words like "computer" (Though quite some languages make up their own words, like German rechner, Finnish tietokone, French ordinateur.) Examples of languages families are Afro-Asiatic, Dravidian, Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan, ...
  Learning a language from another language family is one of the hardest things to do since the student must start from scratch.
• add +1 for a language of a different branch of the same language family. Within the Indo-European language family, we find from West to East roughly these language branches (non comprehensive list): Celtic -> Germanic & Romance, Baltic & Slavic & Hellenic -> Armenian -> Indo-Iranian. The greater the (geographic and linguistic) distance between the languages, the more sound shifts have occurred and vocabulary will be harder to recognize.
  You can compare words in different Indo-European languages in this wikipedia article: List of Proto-Indo-European nouns.
  There is a distance of 7000 km or 4400 miles between Ireland (Irish, Celtic language) and India (Hindi, Indo-Iranian language). For these distances, you may want to add +2. Similar distances may be found in other language families.
• add +1 if there are (more) cases.
  Cases are word inflections according to their grammatical function. E.g. for the word 'girl' (singular) in Latin, there is: (Nominative) Puella, (Genitive) Puellae, (Dative) Puellae, (Accusative) Puellam, (Ablative) Puella, (Vocative) Puella.
  In plural we have: (Nominative) Puellae, (Genitive) Puellarum, (Dative) Puellis, (Accusative) Puellas, (Ablative) Puellis, (Vocative) Puellae.
  The Finnish language has 15 cases, though they're no all that difficult and to a certain extent replace 'our' prepositions, Hungarian has +/- 18, Tsez is said to have 252 case combinations!
  If you don't know any language without cases, all this will seem unnecessarily complicated.
• add +1 for noun classes.
  A phenomenon unknown to Indo-European languages, but present in all Bantu-languages, some Native American and aboriginal languages, the Basque language and some Caucasian languages. Nouns may belong to a given class because of characteristic features, such as sex, animacy, shape, etc. This distinction may also be arbitrary, a bit like the genders (male, female and neuter) in Germanic and Romance languages. Japanese has different counters for flat objects like books (~satsu) or round shapes like bottles (~hon), cars and appliances (~dai). Languages with noun classes may require verbal, adjectival and pronominal prefixes to be in concordance with the noun prefix of a certain class.
• add +1 for a different word structure
  This one is less concrete and maybe quite subjective since it is harder to measure, but vocabulary in different languages can look very differently.
  Some languages have a preference for short words (English), other languages have a lot of long words (Greenlandic, German, Hungarian, ...). In some languages, consonants and vowels alternate very frequently (Finnish, Japanese, Hawaiian, ...), some languages have a lot of consecutive consonants. 
  Compare "May peace prevail on earth." (English), "Enga anie hanjaka eran'izao tontolo izao ny fandriampahalemana." (Malagasy language), "Caù hoò bình cho toàn nhan loai tren the giò'i." (Vietnamese), ...
  For some students, this may be an extra difficulty when learning a new language. Note that a different language family or branch often has a different word structure; so this item is in a way related to that particular topic, but not necessarily. Use this one sparingly, or not at all.
• add +1 for different synthetic levels 
  In isolating languages like Chinese or Vietnamese, words typically consist of a single morpheme [morpheme = smallest part of speech that conveys a meaning]. Synthetic languages combine several morphemes into a single word. E.g. the English word handshakes consists of 3 morphemes  - hand, shake and s (for plural). 
  Polysynthetic languages combine so much information into one word, that it represents a full sentence in other languages. E.g. "Tusaatsiarunnanngittualuujunga." = "I can't hear very well" in Nunavut Inuktitut.
• add +1 for a lot of new phonemes
  Compared to English, Hindi has approximately half as many vowels and twice as many consonants. This can make pronunciation challenging. Hindi not only has English consonants like 'k', 'p' and 't', but also their aspired counterpart 'kh', 'ph' and 'th' . E.g. the English word "pin" is more aspired in Britain than in the US, but the meaning is the same. In other languages, these differences can be distinctive. In Hindi, there are also retroflex consonants; pronounced with the tip of the tongue flat to curled. 
  Many Southern African languages have click consonants, an example is the English disapproving "tsk!"-sound.  Sesotho has 3, Dahalo 4, Xhosa has 18 and the Taa language is said to have 45 to 115 click phonemes, depending on analysis. All this will be quite challenging for the language student.
• add +1 for more tonality 
  ​Another 'challenge' (a euphemism for 'difficulty') in Chinese language is the tonal aspect: words can have different meanings depending on the pitch. The classical example is the "ma"-series: mā (媽/妈) = mom/mum; má (麻/麻) 'hemp'; mǎ (馬/马) 'horse'; mà (罵/骂) 'scold' and ma (嗎/吗) (interrogative particle).
  Tones occur in some other Asian languages (Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, ...), Sub-Saharan African languages and some Native American languages.
• add +1 if the language is not phonetic
  English and French are not very phonetic, which make them difficult to learn for many people (e.g. Asians), but also for other Europeans. Both English and French people have great difficulty mastering the other one's language. Spanish and Swahili on the other hand are very phonetic, and thus easier to learn.

Apart from these inherent properties, there are also personal influences that facilitate - or not - language learning.

Personal influences
Here is a number of factors dependant on the language student that make language acquisition harder - or easier:

• an open mind
  If you want to learn Russian or Polish, but you hate the cases, you will not master them easily. If, instead, you turn it into a game, it might become fun!
• number of languages learnt
  Every language learnt is an asset. Maybe not because of the languages themselves, but for having gotten to know yourself and your ideal way of studying. Especially adults learn less intuitively and must therefor develop a good method.
• motivation
  Conditio sine qua non
• discipline
  No pain, no gain!
• time
  If you spend an hour a week or so on a language similar to yours, that might still work (E.g. Spanish or Italian if you know French), but you won't be able to make great progress in Chinese.
• experience/strategy
  Every language student must develop his/her optimal study routine. Some like a prefab phrase book, some may want to plunge into grammar books, and others might stick post-its all around the house. Invest some time in finding or developing your personal best strategy and you will make more progress later on.
• exposure/proximity
  If you try to learn a language from another continent that nobody around you speaks, try to at least listen to it through the world wide web (youtube, ...). Listening is very important for speaking, as is reading for writing.
• age (sorry!)
  Maybe age itself is not the problem, but the fact that you're not used to studying anymore, plus the fact that a new language may feature whole new things you are unaccustomed to. It might take some time to get into it again and learn a new language, but it is definitely worth it! Research claims that bilingual people's brains function better and for longer after developing the disease. (1)
• confusion
  if you know just a little Spanish and you want to start to learn Italian or Portuguese, you might start confusing things. It's better to have a profound knowledge of the one language before learning another similar one. If you know the other language very well, it will become an asset to learn the new one

Now compare different language students

• A bilingual person (Italian & Polish parents) who wants to learn Romanian vs. someone from Wales.
• A Chuvash who wants to learn Turkish vs. a speaker of Finnish;
• A Chinese who wants to learn Vietnamese vs. a speaker of Xhosa;
• A Japanese teacher of English who wants to learn German compared with a Yiddish speaking person;
• A Navajo who wants to learn Swahili vs an Arab.

Sources
I didn't find it useful to include a list of sources for every single example cited; everything has been verified, mostly through Wikipedia. It is a very useful (descriptive) source for information about languages and linguistics. 
(1) http://www.livescience.com/12917-learning-language-bilingual-protects-alzheimers.html

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