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Ok, so first, I need to tell you that
classifying languages into easy and hard groups is a very difficult task because
the amount of time you need to learn a new language depends not only on the
complexity of the language itself, but also on your native language, on the
languages you've learned before, on the amount of exposure to the language, and
also on your motivation.
But the Foreign Service Institute of the United States
did a great job
researching languages and classifying them into 3 groups: easy, medium and hard
to learn and among the criteria they used to classify languages,
they looked at sounds, they looked at word formation,
sentence formation---so basically how words are ordered into sentences---they
also looked at levels of politeness that exist in each
language and also they looked at their writing systems.
So what they found out
is that there are 4 languages that are
considerably harder for English native speakers to learn, but not only for
English native speakers, but also native speakers of other languages, such as
romance languages. So, in order to achieve writing and speaking proficiency
in one of those 4 difficult languages,
a native English speaker would have to study for about 2,200 hours, so if you study 5
hours every day, 5 days a week, it would take you about 1.7 years to become
proficient in one of those hard languages, which is 5 times more than the time
you need to become proficient in one of the "easy" languages.
So, the 4 hardest
languages for English native speakers to learn are Arabic...
Arabic is hard because it has a very complex writing
system which uses fewer vowels, so it's very hard for English native
speakers and also because it has very few words that resemble European words.
The second language among these 4 hard languages is Chinese...
Chinese is very hard because of the writing system which has thousands of
characters and also because it's a tonal language, so the same word can mean many
different things depending on the way you pronounce it which makes it very
complicated and difficult to learn.
The third language among these 4 difficult
languages is Korean...
Korean is difficult also because of its writing
system and also because of its sentence structure---so the way they order words to
form sentences---and also because of its verb conjugations.
And the other language in
this group of very hard languages to learn is Japanese...
Japanese is also very hard because of its writing system...actually, Japanese
has 3 different writing systems, so it's very complicated and also because
Japanese has several levels of politeness, so you can say the same thing in many
different ways depending on the age of the person you're speaking to, depending
on your own age, depending on the level of intimacy with-- you have with the
person you speaking to, so...it's very, very hard to grasp all these details about Japanese.
If you want to learn one of these 4 difficult languages,
don't be discouraged by the fact that they're very hard to learn
because sometimes, it can be harder to learn an "easy" language if you don't care about that language.
If you really want to learn Japanese, for example, and you love Japanese culture,
you love everything about Japan, it's going to be way easier and more fun for you to learn Japanese.
So, don't worry about the difficulty of the language, just go for the language you're most passionate about.
Well, I hope you have enjoyed this video. If you liked it, please leave a thumbs-up,
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I'll see you next week!
Bye-bye!