Table
    of Contents


    

    
 


    
Research
   


    
The students and teachers I surveyed almost
    unanimously decided that some languages were more difficult to
    learn than others, and the students, when questioned why they
    felt this way, mentioned that languages that use different alphabets
    and require different vocal sounds are more challenging than
    languages more similar to English.


    
In her book Teaching Language in Context,
    Alice Omaggio Hadley cites a study done by the Foreign Service
    Institute about how quickly it takes a group of language learners
    to reach proficiency in oral language when receiving the FSI's
    intensive training. They divided their learners into three groups
    based on their aptitude for language learning (minimum, average,
    and superior) and divided the languages being learned into three
    groups. At the end of the 24-week, 720-hour intensive program,
    the students were given an Oral Proficiency Interview, and their
    skill levels were judged on the ACTFL Proficiency scale. The
    results are surprising.


    
 

    

      

        
         
        
        
 Aptitude for Language Learning

      

      

        
        
 Minimum

        
        
Average

        
        
Superior

      

      

        
         Group I: Afrikaans, Danish, Dutch, French,
        Haitian Creole, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish,
        Swahili, Swedish.
        
        
2

        
        
2+

        
        
3

      

      

        
         Group II: Bulgarian, Dari, Farsi, German,
        Greek, Hindi, Indonesian, Malay, Urdu
        
        
2/2+

        
        
2+/3

        
        
3/3+

      

      

        
        Group III: Amharic, Bengali, Burmese, Czech,
        Finnish, Hebrew, Hungarian, Khmer, Lao, Nepali, Pilipino, Polish,
        Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Sinhala, Thai, Tamil, Turkish, Vietnamese
        
        
2

        
        
2+

        
        
3

      

      

        
        Group IV: Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean
        
        
2+

        
        
3

        
        
3+

      

    


    


    
The languages at which this group were
    most successful included those judged most difficult by both
    students and teachers: Chinese, Japanese, and Arabic. At all
    levels, students of Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean learned
    as much or more as students of European languages such as Spanish,
    widely assumed to be the easiest to learn!


    
Admittedly, however, the FSI study only
    looked at oral proficiency, not at reading or writing skills.
    But even just speaking non-European languages is an accomplishmen:
    many students assume these languages to be difficult to speak
    because they require different sounds, or phonemes. Cognitive
    scientist Stephen Pinker writes that English uses 40 different
    phonemes, compared at the extremes to 11 for Polynesian and 141
    for Khoisan (171). Though it is very difficult for an adult to
    learn to speak a new language without an accent, the different
    sounds can be approximated.


    
Why should it be just as hard to learn
    any language as any other? Because most languages have more in
    common than they at first appear to. Pinker quotes Noam Chomsky
    as saying that "a visiting Martian scientist would surely
    conclude that aside from a few mutually unintelligible vocabularies,
    Earthlings speak a single language" (232). Though there
    are certainly differences in various grammatical systems, many
    of the same rules about part-of-speech order and such are similar
    even in languages that appear to be entirely unrelated. Whether
    because all languages are from one ancestor language or because
    human brains are structured in the same way no matter what their
    geographic location, these similarities do exist, and should
    be noted when selecting a language to learn.