What are the easiest/most difficult foreign languages for English speakers to learn?
Tuesday, 12th February 2013
Each language presents the learner with a different combination of challenges. Some have very different grammar to English, some have different vocabulary, some use quite different sounds, while others use different alphabets or other writing systems.
Generally the more differences there between your native language and the language you are learning, the harder it is to learn.
Languages that have most in common with English include other Germanic languages such as Dutch, German and Norwegian, and Romance languages such as French, Spanish and Italian. These languages are all written with the same alphabet, they share a lot of vocabulary, and have some similarities in their grammar. Another language that is relatively easy for English speakers to learn is Indonesian, which is written with the Latin alphabet, has relatively straightforward grammar, and has quite a few loanwords from English.
Languages written with different alphabets, such as Greek, Russian and Bulgarian, have quite a lot of vocabulary in common with English, but the different alphabets add an extra layer of difficulty to learning them, as does their relatively complex grammar. More complex alphabets and writing systems, such as those used in India, China and Japan, make learning languages particularly challenging, especially Chinese and Japanese.
The grammatical structure of languages varies considerably: English uses very few inflections on verbs and nouns, and relies mainly on word order to indicate the roles of words in a sentence. Other languages, such as Polish and Czech, make copious use of inflections, and some, including Finnish, Hungarian and Turkish, can add long strings of suffixes to words.
The sounds and intonation patterns used in some languages can make them quite challenging to pronounce well. In Czech, Russian and Georgian there many tricky clusters of consonants – zmrzlina is the Czech for icecream for example – while languages like Chinese and Thai use tones to distinguish words. Then there’s languages such as Zulu and Xhosa which have click sounds.
Another factor that makes some languages more difficult to learn than others is the availability of learning materials and other resources. For French, Spanish and other popular languages there should be no problem finding courses, dictionaries and people to practise with. However for languages that relatively few people learn it might be tricky to find such material. In some cases you may have to learn another language first before learning the one you’re interested in. For example, if you want to learn Greenlandic or Faroese you’ll find that most of the materials are in Danish.
Overall the least difficult languages for English speakers to learn are French, Spanish, Italian and German, while the most difficult are Chinese, Japanese and Arabic. Although this does depend on which other languages you already know.
Cactus is one of the world’s leading language training companies, providing courses in over 25 languages, in 45 countries and 150 destinations worldwide.
Test your level in 17 different languages
More about Cactus’ evening courses in the UK/ North America
More about tailor-made and corporate language training options
More about language courses abroad with Cactus
Tags: chinese, course, languages, language, italian, learning, german, french, spanish, english
Posted by Simon Ager 2013-02 under Attitudes to Language Learning,
Permalink
