Hi, Steve Kaufmann here.
And today I want to talk about a subject that often comes up.
What is the easiest language to learn?
Okay.
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So is there an easier language?
I think here there are both, um, subjective factors and objective
factors, which you have to consider.
All right.
So I think the most important consideration is how motivated are you
to learn the language, uh, because if you are very motivated, the, the difficulties,
the objective difficulties, which I'll get into, will kind of disappear.
So when it comes to which language is easiest, you have to begin by saying which
language am I most motivated to learn?
All right.
A second consideration: to what extent is it easy to find interesting material,
compelling input in that language?
Uh, I have to confess that I have had difficulty with some languages where it
has been difficult to find compelling input, Korean, Czech in some ways, uh,
whereas other languages where there's lots of content available on the
internet, especially today, uh, like Russian and like Spanish, like English.
It's a lot easier.
Uh, I'm struggling a bit now with Arabic and Persian.
I have recently found some really good stuff in Arabic.
Um, once I get ahold of some compelling content, it spurs me on, it influences
my, my confidence, my enthusiasm.
So, um, obviously a subjective factor then is how interested are you in the language?
Uh, can you find compelling input in that language?
Another thing is confident levels...
confidence level.
If you sort of think you can't or whatever, if you're, so you're not
interested or you can't find interesting content and you think you can't learn it,
it's going to be very difficult for you.
Whereas if you are convinced that you can do it, this is
another subjective consideration that I think is very important.
And, uh, it, as in any language learning situation, you
have to take the initiative.
You have to take the initiative to go out there and find content of interest and
pursue things that are of interest to you.
So those are some of the subjective considerations, but there is one
factor that's kind of a combination of subjective and objective.
So rather than saying language X is the most difficult or the easiest
to a large extent, it depends on the languages you already know.
So, because to me, vocabulary is the biggest issue.
Language learning is about learning words.
So if you speak a language, say you speak Spanish and you want to learn Italian,
obviously 85% of the words in Italian are identifiable as being similar to
Spanish, even allowing for the odd false friend, which really doesn't matter.
There aren't so many of them.
The fact that the vocabulary is similar is going to help you, uh, similarly for
an English speaker, Spanish, French, all of the Latin based languages have a lot
of vocabulary in common with English.
So I think the vocabulary is the biggest issue.
It's a bigger issue, I think, than grammar.
Because we can get used to the grammar in time, we'll get used to the grammar,
but if we have to learn and relearn and forget and relearn, and, and
there's so many words to learn that makes the language more difficult.
For example, Romanian has a grammatical structure that's quite unique.
They have a number of unique features.
However, 70% of their vocabulary is very similar to other romance languages.
And so with that, Romanian becomes quite easy to learn despite its
different grammatical structure.
So is the vocabulary in the language you want to learn similar
to a language you already know?
So that means that for example, for a person who...
so say a Japanese speaker.
They've got the characters in Japanese and they've got a lot of the vocabulary.
Even the Koreans who don't use Chinese characters, a lot of their
vocabulary, 50% just as the case with the Japanese is of Chinese origin.
So they have an easier time, whereas say Europeans or people from north
America or from the Middle East, or from somewhere else where they
don't have this vocabulary, it's going to be more difficult for them.
Now, objective consideration is things like the writing system.
Obviously, if it's, it it's much easier to learn a language that's
written in your own writing system, because since you were a child you've
been reading in that writing system.
So to get the brain, even if you understand how Chinese characters
work or Arabic writing, uh, it's going to be difficult to get used
to reading, uh, comfortably quickly.
So that...
since reading is such a big part of language learning, if you can't read
comfortably, it's going to slow you down.
So that's an objective consideration.
Now of the different writing systems, some of them are very much parallel
to the Latin alphabet and that's the case with Cyrillic or with Greek,
others are true alphabets, like the Hangul, but very different.
And then you have syllabary is like Japanese hiragana and Katakana.
And then you have, uh, I should point out by the way, the Arabic
script is also an alphabet, but it's for me, difficult to get used to.
Um, and then you have Chinese characters, which are even more difficult.
So writing system is a big consideration.
Another, um, objective consideration is grammar.
I find that of the languages that I have learned, the Slavic languages
have the most complicated grammar, more case endings to try to remember
while you're speaking, uh, certain concepts like, uh, aspects of
verbs, verbs of motion that I found.
But I have never had to struggle with issues in English like articles.
So maybe for speakers of those other languages, the articles
in English, and maybe some other things, make English difficult.
So it again gets back to this idea that certain languages are
subjectively easier or difficult.
I know that the Foreign Service Institute in the United States has
put, you know, their evaluation of how many instructional hours are
required for different languages.
And on that basis, they rated them by level of difficulty.
But that's typically based on an English speaker in a classroom.
So how relevant that is to anybody out there who doesn't happen to be
an English speaker studying in a classroom I don't know, but it's also
a bit of an indicator of the level of difficulty of different languages.
So easiest to learn, I would say for an English speaker is Spanish.
Um, German is somewhat more complicated in its grammar and I haven't done a
study, but I have the feeling that the vocabulary between English and Spanish
is more similar than English and German.
Although there's a lot of vocabulary in German that helps us.
I don't think either of those languages is nearly as difficult as languages where
we have no common vocabulary: Arabic, Persian or, uh, obviously Chinese.
So I hope that's helpful.
And a little bit of a discussion on the difficulty of different languages.
And I'll leave you the couple of videos I've done on the same subject.